Tag: space.com

NASA is marking its 60th anniversary year with a new commemorative logo.

The aviation and space agency revealed the design on its website on Wednesday (Jan. 3).

“NASA will mark the 60th anniversary of its establishment as a U.S. government agency,” a NASA press release said of the logo. “NASA has released an official logo for use in observing this milestone anniversary.” [NASA’s 10 Greatest Science Missions]

NASA, or, spelled out, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was established on July 29, 1958, with the signing of legislation by President Dwight Eisenhower. The agency celebrates its birthday on Oct. 1, the day it formally began operation.

The NASA 60th anniversary logo was created by Matthew Skeins, a graphic artist working at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

“The logo depicts how NASA is building on its historic past to soar toward a challenging and inspiring future,” agency officials wrote in the press release.

On the logo, the number “60” and “NASA” are stacked one atop the other, and they are positioned above a nighttime view of the continental United States as seen from space. The arrangement is intended to evoke a quote attributed to 17th century physicist Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

NASA has used the phrase “on the shoulder of giants” to describe its own foundation, including the work done by its predecessor U.S. federal agencies, including the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the Naval Research Laboratory, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the latter now one of NASA’s facilities in California.

The United States is depicted on the logo outlined by the shine from its cities. These yellow lights are meant to also symbolize NASA’s vibrancy and relevance, the inspiration derived from the agency’s work and the foundation of the “best and brightest” among academia and the aerospace industry upon which NASA’s leadership is built.

NASA’s previous anniversary logos: 25th in 1983 (top left), 40th in 1998 (bottom left) and 50th in 2008 (at right).

Credit: NASA via collectSPACE.com

A light blue and white arc below the “60 NASA” invokes a sunrise, as seen 16 times daily from the vantage point of spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, and represents “opportunity yet to come through exploration” of the moon, Mars and other destinations beyond, according to NASA.

Two vectors, one blue and the other red, circle “60 NASA” and point to the logo’s dark outer edges as if heading into the unknown. The vectors’ trajectories form a “6,” which is emblematic of the decades since NASA was established.

The blue vector symbolizes NASA’s aeronautical research and the impact on society of our first views of Earth as a “blue marble” in the vast blackness of space.

The red vector is intended to represent NASA’s exploration programs, including the contributions of its commercial and international partners, to enable future astronaut missions to the moon, Mars and out into the solar system. Depicted at the tip of the red vector are the key elements of NASA’s deep space architecture, the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew vehicle.

A crescent moon, a ringed planet and a field of stars amid a nebula of light blue are meant to be symbolic of NASA’s focus on science and specifically its investigations into the workings and evolution of our planet, solar system and the universe.

The 60th anniversary logo is the latest commemorative art to mark NASA’s milestone years. The agency had designs to celebrate its 25th anniversary in 1983, 40th anniversary in 1998 and 50th anniversary in 2008.

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A study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters posits that Mars formed in what today is the Asteroid Belt, roughly one and a half times as far from the sun as its current position, before migrating to its present location. 

The assumption has generally been that Mars formed near Earth from the same building blocks, but that conjecture raises a big question: why are the two planets so different in composition? Mars contains different, lighter, silicates than Earth, more akin to those found in meteorites. In an attempt to explain why the elements and isotopes on Mars differ widely from those on Earth, researchers from Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom ran simulations to gain insights into the Red Planet’s movement within the solar system.

Even though the study’s simulations suggested that the most probable explanation is that Mars formed near Earth, that model doesn’t account for the compositional differences between the two planets. Thus, researchers paid particular attention to simulations consistent with the so-called Grand Tack model, which suggests that Jupiter played a major role in the formation and final orbital architecture of the inner planets. The theory holds that a newly-established Jupiter plowed a large concentration of mass towards the sun, which contributed to the formation of Earth and Venus, while simultaneously pushing material away from Mars, accounting for the planet’s small mass (roughly 11 percent that of Earth) and the difference between the two planets’ compositions. [Inside Planet Mars (Infographic)]

In Grand Tack simulations, the researchers gleaned additional insight into Mars’ formation. A small percentage of the simulations suggested that Mars formed much farther from the Sun than it is now and that Jupiter’s gravitational pull pushed Mars into its current position. 

University of Colorado Geological Sciences professor Stephen Mojzsis, a co-author of the study, isn’t concerned by the low probability of this scenario taking place.

“Low probability means one of two things: that we don’t have a better physical mechanism to explain Mars’ formation or in the enormous panoply of possibilities we ended up with one that is relatively rare,” he says, noting that the latter seems to be the best conclusion. 

Mojzsis also keeps such terms in perspective. “Keep in mind that rare is relative,” when it comes to space, he says, and rare outcomes do happen. What are the chances that Earth would cross orbits with the asteroid that hit the Yucatan and rendered the dinosaurs extinct?

“Given enough time, we can expect these events,” Mojzsis says. “For example, you’ll eventually get double sixes if you roll the dice enough times. The probability is 1/36 or roughly the same as we get for our simulations of Mars’ formation.”

One implication of Mars forming farther away from the sun is that the planet would have been colder than originally thought — perhaps too cold for liquid water or to sustain life. This theory would seem to challenge the idea that Mars was once far warmer and wetter than it is now. Mojzsis argues that there’s plenty of time in Mars’ early history for it to have been both colder and farther away and at times for for it to have experienced warm, wet periods. 

“Mars’ formation in the Asteroid Belt took place very early in Mars’ history, well before the crust stabilized and the atmosphere was established,” he says. In a paper he co-authored last year, Mojzsis concludes that late in Mars’ planetary formation it was bombarded by asteroids that formed the planet’s countless craters. Such large impacts could “melt the cryosphere and Mars’ crust to densify Mars’ atmosphere and to restart the hydrologic cycle,” Mojzsis says. [Missions to Mars: A Robot Red Planet Invasion History (Infographic)]

A model of our current solar system.

Credit: NASA/JPL

While many scientists are beginning to embrace the idea of planetary migration, studies such as this raise additional questions regarding the planets and their histories. What is Venus’ composition and how does it compare to that of Earth? Confirmation of similarities between Venus and Earth would circumstantially support the idea that, in the Grand Tack theory, Jupiter pushed material in-system to form Earth and Venus. It would also support researchers’ theories about the formation of planets in the inner solar system, including Mars. However, the lack of any samples, even meteorites, from Venus makes it difficult to answer that question. NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos have proposed the joint Venera-D mission that would send an orbiter to Venus around 2025, which may yield some clues to the planet’s composition.

Mojzsis also points out that one of the problems we face is trying to understand how the giant planets formed. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune couldn’t have formed where they now reside because the outer solar system didn’t have enough mass early on to account for these giant worlds, he says. 

It could be that the giant planets formed close together and then later moved away by the influence of their gravitational interactions. Such a theory isn’t unique to our solar system. “We understand from direct observations via the Kepler Space Telescope and earlier studies that giant planet migration is a normal feature of planetary systems,” Mojzsis says. “Giant planet formation induces migration, and migration is all about gravity, and these worlds affected each other’s orbits early on.” 

Mojzsis’ recent work also focuses on how Jupiter ended up in its current position and how its formation corresponds with the dispersal of gas and dust from the Sun’s planet-forming disc. Little by little, scientists are gaining a greater understanding of the solar system’s history—and of the nature of planetary formation in our galactic neighborhood. 

Mojzsis’ work was supported in part by NASA’s Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program and by the John Templeton Foundation-FfAME origins project. 

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program. This version of the story published on Space.com. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+.

WASHINGTON — With utilization of the International Space Station reaching a maximum, and with its long-term future uncertain, a recent report recommends that NASA develop transition plans and make use of alternative platforms, including commercial vehicles, to carry out critical microgravity research.

The midterm assessment of the 2011 decadal survey on life and physical sciences research at NASA, released by a committee of the National Academies Dec. 15, supported efforts by NASA to increase research on the ISS, but warned the agency needed to act soon to develop a transition plan for such research after 2024.

“It is essential that NASA as quickly as possible develop a International Space Station-post-2024 strategy,” the report stated in one of its recommendations. “This development factors strongly in the overall exploration strategy, space life and physical sciences research priorities, and resource allocation in terms of crew time, cargo delivery, and funding.” [Cosmic Quiz: Do You Know the International Space Station?]

NASA and its international partners have committed to operating the ISS only through 2024, and support for an extension of station operations beyond that point is uncertain. A NASA authorization bill enacted in March 2017 directed NASA to develop an ISS transition plan to show how the agency will shift from “from the current regime that relies heavily on NASA sponsorship to a regime where NASA could be one of many customers of a low-Earth orbit non-governmental human space flight enterprise.”

The authorization bill set a Dec. 1 deadline for the report. However, as of earlier last month the agency had yet to submit the report to Congress.

The report’s call for a transition plan stems from both addressing the growing utilization of the ISS as well as the expectation that research in low Earth orbit will need to continue beyond 2024. The committee noted in its report that both internal and external facilities at the ISS for hosting experiments are nearly full, but suggested that privately-developed capabilities would be a more effective means of meeting demand versus building more government-funded facilities for a station that may only operate until the mid-2020s.

“As the research capability on the ISS reaches maximum throughput in 2018, it will be important to focus on complete utilization of those facilities rather than developing additional government-funded facilities,” the report stated. “Budget data presented to the committee indicate that if fewer new facilities were to be developed, significant funds would become available for the conduct of experiments in existing facilities on the ISS.”

The report also made clear, though, that as NASA looks to human missions beyond Earth in the 2020s and beyond, it will still need a research capability in low Earth orbit to address the “significant unknowns and risks” of such missions.

“LEO science research needed for exploration will be required beyond 2024,” the report concluded. “Extended durations in microgravity, measured in years, will continue to be required to best meet deep space exploration research needs.”

The report also recommended NASA examine a more diverse range of platforms for such research that doesn’t require the space station’s unique capabilities, ranging from terrestrial laboratories to free-flying satellites. Those alternative platforms also include new commercial suborbital vehicles under development and entering service.

“The Academies and the midterm assessment recognizes the value and the future of suborbital research opportunities,” said Dan Dumbacher, a Purdue University professor and co-chair of the study, in a Dec. 18 presentation at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Broomfield, Colorado.

Dumbacher said that recommendation and others in the report has been accepted by both NASA leadership and Congressional staffers briefed on its findings prior to its release. “Everybody recognized the value of those statements,” he said.

Dumbacher, who becomes executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) this month, said he’s interested in using that new position to help support alternative research platforms like suborbital vehicles. “Because of the national recognition of what is going on in this arena, and what the future can and may hold, AIAA is here to help support,” he said.

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

WASHINGTON — The public’s idea of a war in space is almost entirely a product of Hollywood fantasy: Interstellar empires battling to conquer the cosmos, spaceships going head to head in pitched dogfights

The reality of how nations will fight in space is much duller and blander. And some of the key players in these conflicts will be hackers and lawyers.

Savvy space warriors like Russia’s military already are giving us a taste of the future. They are jamming GPS navigation signals, electronically disrupting satellite communications links and sensors in space. Not quite star wars. [The Most Dangerous Space Weapons Concepts Ever]

This form of electronic warfare in space is serious enough, however, that the U.S. military is now moving to defend its satellites and other space assets. There is in fact a real conversation under way about war in space, albeit one of cyber and electromagnetic attacks, not spaceships shooting at each other.

“There are legal and practical limits on armed conflict in space,” said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation in Washington, D.C.

“Most people experience space through Hollywood movies, TV shows and science-fiction books,’ he said during an online discussion last month hosted by the American Bar Association. In almost all cases the depictions of warfare and combat in space are fictional. “They take extreme liberties and show outright ignorance of the laws of physics, orbital mechanics, conservation of energy and other things in order to make stories more dramatic and exciting.”

Weeden mentioned “The Expanse” as a rare case of a TV show that depicts spare warfare pretty close to accurately, but he insisted that the gap between fiction and reality with regard to space war is stark. [Military Space – Spacecraft, Weapons and Tech]

Space indeed has turned into an important battlefront, and for good reasons. It is critical to nearly all aspects of national security and military power, including intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, communications, precision timing and navigation, attack warning and targeting of potential threats. The issue for the United States is to figure out how to thwart attacks within the boundaries of current treaties and legal frameworks, Weeden said. “Counterspace is now part of conventional warfare because space itself is part of conventional warfare.”

Non‐kinetic attacks like jamming and interference are occurring more often. They are cheaper and easier to pull off than full-on kinetic destruction of satellites that would require a high-power laser or a ballistic missile.

As the Pentagon maps out strategies and tactics to defend its satellites, military lawyers are actively investigating how international law applies to outer space.

“Any operation in outer space must comply with the same law that is applicable to other domains, like sea, air and ground warfare,” said Michael Hoversten, chief of space, cyber, international, and operations law at Air Force Space Command headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.

As with other uses of military force, actions in space are restricted by international rules. If U.S. satellites were attacked, there is no ambiguity, he said. “The right to use force in self defense applies.”

International law concerns

The preeminent statute of international space law is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, but some of the language is becoming harder to interpret in today’s environment, Hoversten said. “The treaty states that the Moon and other celestial bodies must be used exclusively for peaceful purposes” but it does not specifically say that outer space is exclusively a haven for peaceful purposes. The phrase “peaceful purposes” has been interpreted as “no military use” and also as “nonaggressive military use consistent with international law and the UN charter.”

The reality is that many countries use space for military purposes, he said. And most are reluctant to sign on to new treaties that might restrict their ability to exploit space in national security or economic activities.

The majority view is that military use is permissible, provided that it’s nonaggressive and consistent with international law and UN charter, Hoversten said. There is no consensus, however, about the meaning of “militarization” and “weaponization” of space, and different states use these terms differently. Outer space has been militarized for decades, but that is not the same as weaponization. “There is a common misconception that weapons of all kinds are illegal in outer space. That is not the case.” The only specific prohibition is against so-called weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological.

Electronic arms like lasers or jammers, or even conventional kinetic weapons can lawfully be placed in orbit, he said. Some countries, notably China and Russia, for the past decade have championed efforts to prohibit all kinds of space weapons. The United States has opposed bans primarily because of difficulties in defining what a weapon is, Hoversten explained. Theoretically any satellite that is capable of maneuvering can be used as a weapon. U.S. officials also have argued that an arms control treaty for space weapons would be unverifiable.

Also a topic of debate is how the U.S. military would justify the use of countermeasures. So far it remains a fuzzy issue, said Maj. Ross Brown, chief of space, international and operations law at 14th Air Force headquarters at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

“Below an armed attack, the most applicable response is a countermeasure,” he said. But the devil is in the details. “Countermeasures must be proportional. Must not be forceful. They must be constrained. Must be reversible,” Brown said. “It’s a ‘mushy’ requirement.”

Another concern is that the response must be “proportionate to the injury being suffered,” he said. “That is difficult to measure.” Disruptions to satellite links can cause material damage but also “strategic harm” if the military is cut off from access to information.

As the Pentagon and others sound alarms about cyber threats to space, the reality is that very little is known about the frequency of attacks or even the scope of the danger.

“Public data on cyber attacks on any satellites, military or commercial, is extremely scarce,” said Weeden. “Militaries, governments, space agencies, companies are pretty reluctant to talk publicly about cyber attacks, whether successful or unsuccessful.”

There have been widely publicized incidents like the jamming of an HBO satellite signal in 1986 by a hacker dubbed “Captain Midnight.” On the government side, Congress has openly chided NASA for cyber attacks against its aging command-and-control infrastructure. But there are very few details.

“We have satellites and ground control infrastructure that are, easily, one to three decades old,” Weeden said. “I don’t think it’s a stretch to really wonder just how hardened they may be against sophisticated cyber attacks. But we don’t have any good data on that.”

Satellite providers that are under contract to the Defense Department are required to report breaches. Otherwise, commercial companies would not want vulnerabilities or weakness known that can hurt their business and might invite additional attacks.

Commercial communications providers are now investing billions of dollars in cybersecurity technologies as they seek to attract government and military customers. They are putting up high-throughput satellites with smaller beams that are more resilient against jamming. And they are shielding satellite uplinks and downlinks with Pentagon-approved encryption.

Hoversten said a number of space agencies and governments are coming together to draft a new rulebook on military uses of outer space. “A comprehensive manual is a few years down the road.”

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

A 9-ton Chinese space lab will fall out of the sky soon — and if you predict exactly when, you can win some swag.

The Aerospace Corp.’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) is sponsoring a guessing game about the death day of China’s uncrewed Tiangong-1 spacecraft, which is currently forecast to plunge uncontrolled into Earth’s atmosphere in mid-March, plus or minus two weeks. 

If you pick the correct day — or if you’re closer than anyone else — you’ll win some Aerospace Corp. booty. To play, go to the CORDS site here. Note that 1the company. [Gallery: Tiangong 1, China’s First Space Laboratory]

A huge space lab

Tiangong-1 is the first space station built and launched by China. It was designed to be a crewed lab as well as an experiment/demonstration for a larger, multiple-module space station that the nation aims to have up and running by the mid-2020s.

The solar-powered Tiangong-1 is 34 feet (10.5 meters) long and sports a diameter of 11 feet (3.4 m). The space lab has two main pieces — a ;— and it features 530 cubic feet (TKTK), complete with sleep stations for astronauts.

Tiangong-1 launched in September 2011. In November of that year, China successfully docked an uncrewed Shenzhou spacecraft with the space lab. The nation then sent two piloted missions to visit Tiangong-1: Shenzhou 9 in June 2012 and Shenzhou 10 in June 2013.

Where on Earth?

On March 21, 2016, an official Chinese statement declared that telemetry services with Tiangong-1 had ceased.

Based on The Aerospace Corp.’s analysis of data from the U.S. military’s Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), the last orbital adjustment for Tiangong-1 was made in December 2015.

It’s unknown where on Earth Tiangong-1 will re-enter. But given the spacecraft’s inclination, this object will come down somewhere between 43 degrees north latitude and 43 degrees south latitude.

Experts at the European Space Agency (ESA) will host an international campaign to monitor the re-entry of Tiangong-1, conducted by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee.

Because of the Chinese station’s mass and hardy materials, there is a possibility some portions of Tiangong-1 will survive and reach the surface, ESA officials have said.

“Potentially, there may be a highly toxic and corrosive substance called hydrazine on board the spacecraft that could survive re-entry,” CORDS researchers wrote on the organization’s Tiangong-1 re-entry page. “For your safety, do not touch any debris you may find on the ground nor inhale vapors it may emit.”

Working group

In a Dec. 8 communiqué from the Permanent Mission of China to the United Nations, China discussed Tiangong-1’s upcoming re-entry.

“China attaches great importance to the re-entry of Tiangong-1. For this purpose, China has set up a special working group, made relevant emergency preparedness plans and been working closely with its follow-up tracking, monitoring, forecasting and relevant analyzing,” the communiqué explains.

Until Nov. 26 of last year, Tiangong-1 had been orbiting at an average altitude of 184 miles (296.0 kilometers), circling Earth at an inclination of 42.65 degrees, the update explains.

“Currently, it has maintained its structural integrity with stabilized attitude control,” the communiqué adds. 

Tiangong-1 uses methylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide as its engine fuel.

“Based on analysis, the remaining small amount of fuel will be burned and destroyed along with its structural components during the course of re-entry and will therefore not cause any damage on the ground,” adds the communiqué. “China will continue to closely track and monitor the operation of Tiangong-1 and will regularly publish relevant information through the website of the China Manned Space Engineering Program (www.cmse.gov.cn) as well as other relevant media.”

Leonard David is author of “Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet,” published by National Geographic. The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel series “Mars.” A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. This version of the story published on Space.com. 

WASHINGTON — A controversial shakeup of the military space organization mandated by Congress will get underway in 2018. Details of how and when the changes will unfold are slowly emerging.

A laundry list of provisions in the National Defense Authorization Ac will reshape the military space chain of command and oversight of programs. Pentagon and Air Force officials are still grappling with the full extent of the reforms, the most significant of which is the removal of the role of principal Defense Department space adviser from the secretary of the Air Force.

“A lot of people focused on the fact that Mike Rogers’ idea for a space corps didn’t happen, and they missed that a lot of reform did go into this bill,” Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee told SpaceNews in a recent interview. [The Most Dangerous Space Weapons Concepts Ever]

Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, has been a longtime proponent of creating a space corps within the Air Force with a separate chain of command. The plan was approved by the House but didn’t make it past the Senate.

Smith said Rogers and other members of the HASC have not given up on the idea. “It is a big enough issue that it deserves that level of attention,” he said. “I think logically, eventually, we will get to a space corps,” Smith insisted. “The only reason we didn’t get there this year is because the Senate wasn’t fully briefed, and they weren’t really on board.” The space corps will get another chance, said Smith. “We will push it again.”

In the 2018 NDAA, Congress weakened the Air Force secretary’s power to set military space priorities and influence programs. It directs the deputy secretary of defense to figure out an alternative to the PDSA position established under the Obama administration. The first principal DoD space advisor was former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James. Current Secretary Heather Wilson remains in that role until a new arrangement is put in place.

Smith credited Wilson for recent efforts to move space to the forefront. “We’ll see” how these initiatives play out, he said. “I like Heather Wilson, I think she’s doing a good job, and I take her at her word that she is going to make some changes.”

He predicts Wilson will come around to the idea of a space corps. “When she really starts to look at it, she is going to see that a space corps makes a heck of a lot of sense,” Smith said. “She is sincere and she’s working on making changes to improve the situation.”

There is no question that space needs a higher level of attention than it has received, Smith said. “We put some changes in the bill, they want to make some changes, they want to get better but it’s undeniable that over the course of the last 30 years we have not done what we need to do in space, certainly not in launch.”

Lawmakers fault the Air Force for not investing in important technologies that the military needs to ensure access to space. “We got behind, we became dependent on a Russian engine, we kept using a launch vehicle that is massively expensive, we didn’t take advantage of commercial opportunities,” he said. “There is no question that we have been lagging.”

The responsibility for military space may be too much for the Air Force to handle on top of its other missions, Smith said. “The Air Force is in charge of a lot of things. They’re in charge of nuclear weapons. They’re in charge of air superiority. Being in charge of space is third on that list.”

It will fall on Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan to guide the implementation of the NDAA language. During a meeting with reporters at the Pentagon last week, Shanahan mentioned Michael Griffin — a former NASA administrator recently nominated as principal deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics — as a possible candidate to serve as principal DoD space advisor.

“What’s really exciting about next year, we’ve got Mike Griffin on board,” Shanahan said. “So when you think about somebody who has a lot of experience with space … he’ll be a grand addition to the team.”

Shanahan said he has had discussions with lawmakers about the space reorganization. “Chairman Rogers has been really good on ‘we need to do better’ … rather than redraw the lines and boxes right away,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t end up with a different structure.”

A reorganization demands further study, suggested Shanahan. “I owe them a couple of reports. Those reports will really get at how we’re going to do better.”

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

Just when you thought the weather couldn’t get any worse, The Washington Post hits us with “bomb cyclone.” That’s right: Forecasters suggest this “bomb” will make the U.S. East Coast unbearable for many.

How does a system reach bomb-cyclone status? Its atmospheric pressure must drop so rapidly — at least 24 millibars in 24 hours, according to the National Weather Service (NWS) — that it explodes in strength.

“This can happen when a cold air mass collides with a warm air mass, such as air over warm ocean waters. The formation of this rapidly strengthening weather system is a process called bombogenesis, which creates what is known as a bomb cyclone,” the NWS said.

All day Thursday meteorologists are going to be glued to the new GOES-East satellite watching a truly amazing extratopical “bomb” cyclone off New England coast. It will be massive — fill up entire Western Atlantic off U.S. East Coast. Pressure as low as Sandy & hurricane winds pic.twitter.com/6M4S3y75wT

— Ryan Maue | weather.us (@RyanMaue) January 2, 2018

Enter the polar vortex — a spinning mass of cold air that typically encircles the North Pole. When the system is strong, it treks around the North Pole in a relatively circular shape, bound on the south by the jet stream, according to David Roth, a forecaster for the NWS Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. “Since the [winter] solstice, the polar vortex has been weaker,” Roth told Live Science, adding that “it looks like an amoeba right now.” This planetary-scale phenomenon is partly driving the current winter storm and meteorological bomb. That’s because the frigid Arctic air seeping from the vortex creates what meteorologists call troughs, or low-pressure areas.

The low-pressure system is moving near the Gulf Stream, which stays toasty all year. The temperature gradient between the two is amplifying the pressure drop, Roth said. Adding to this temperature difference is the orientation of the upper trough, or the low-pressure at about 30,000 to 40,000 feet (9,100 to 12,200 meters): This trough is negatively tilted (like a backward slant), which makes the system even stronger, Roth said.

During these bomb-cyclone events, winds can whip up fast, spinning toward the system’s low-pressure center. Snow and blizzard conditions can follow, according to The Weather Channel.

The area of rapidly dropping pressure has already formed off the east coast of Florida this morning (Jan. 3) and will move northeastward, dropping snow over the southern mid-Atlantic coast by tomorrow morning (Jan. 4), according to the NWS. Snow is also forecast over parts of New England by tomorrow morning, with blizzard conditions possible over eastern New England by late Thursday.

“According to WPC [Weather Prediction Center] forecasts, the low is forecast to be 996 mb this evening (00 UTC Thursday) off the Carolinas and 960 mb off New England by Thursday evening (00 UTC Friday), a drop of 36 mb in 24 hours,” Bryan Jackson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center, told Live Science in an email.

In fact, on Friday, record-low temperatures are expected for most of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where highs will hover in “the single digits and teens,” the Post reported. 

Original article on Live Science.

Well, we always knew the alien-megastructure idea was a long shot.

E.T. has nothing to do with the bizarre dimming events of the mysterious object known as Tabby’s star, a new study reports.

“Dust is most likely the reason why the star’s light appears to dim and brighten,” study leader Tabetha Boyajian, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, said in a statement. “The new data shows that different colors of light are being blocked at different intensities. Therefore, whatever is passing between us and the star is not opaque, as would be expected from a planet or alien megastructure.” [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]

Tabby’s star, more formally known as KIC 8462852, lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth and is a bit bigger and hotter than the sun. The star has been in the news a lot since 2015, when a team led by Boyajian (hence the star’s nickname) reported that it had dimmed dramatically over the previous five years or so, once by a whopping 22 percent. 

Further observations added to the intrigue. For example, a different research group found that Tabby’s star had also dropped in brightness overall by about 20 percent from 1890 to 1989.

For the past two-plus years, astronomers have been trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on with Tabby’s star. A number of potential explanations have been floated, from orbiting comet fragments, to a huge dust cloud between Earth and KIC 8462852, to energy-collecting structures built by an advanced alien civilization.

Researchers always stressed that this last possibility was quite remote. And now it looks like we can cross it off entirely.

For the new study, Boyajian and her team observed KIC 8462852 from March 2016 to December 2017, using multiple ground-based telescopes run by the Las Cumbres Observatory. They spotted and analyzed four separate dimming events, which occurred in the summer of 2017.

The new results are consistent with those of another research group, which late last year concluded that Tabby’s star is likely orbited by a cloud of dust that completes one lap every 700 Earth days.

Boyajian and her team funded the new observations via a Kickstarter campaign, which raised more than $107,000. That’s appropriate, because citizen scientists helped Boyajian recognize the weirdness of Tabby’s star in the first place. Her 2015 paper was a collaboration with volunteers from the online group Planet Hunters, who sift through data gathered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, looking for alien worlds. (Kepler spots the tiny dimming events caused when orbiting planets cross their star’s face from the spacecraft’s perspective. KIC 8462852’s massive brightness dips stood out in the Kepler data set as something very different.) 

“I am so appreciative of all of the people who have contributed to this in the past year — the citizen scientists and professional astronomers,” Boyajian said. “It’s quite humbling to have all of these people contributing in various ways to help figure it out.”

There is still work to do, however: Dust may be the leading explanation for KIC 8462852’s odd behavior, but it’s not the only possibility.

“This latest research rules out alien megastructures, but it raises the probability of other phenomena being behind the dimming,” study co-author Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, said in the same statement. 

“There are models involving circumstellar material — like exocomets, which were Boyajian’s team’s original hypothesis — which seem to be consistent with the data we have,” Wright said. But, he added, “some astronomers favor the idea that nothing is blocking the star — that it just gets dimmer on its own — and this also is consistent with this summer’s data.”

The new study was published online today (Jan. 3) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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

About halfway through its two-year trek to the asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft took some stunning images of Earth and the moon as it whizzed past its home planet last fall.

OSIRIS-REx launched toward the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2016, and it returned to Earth for a close flyby on Sept. 22. This encounter gave the spacecraft a speed boost and set it right on course to rendezvous with Bennu in late 2018.

This color composite from OSIRIS-REx’s MapCam instrument shows Earth and the moon as seen from the spacecraft on Oct. 2, 2017, about 10 days after the gravity-assist maneuver. At the time, it was a little over 3 million miles (5 million kilometers) from Earth, or about 13 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. [OSIRIS-REx: NASA’s Asteroid Sample-Return Mission in Pictures]

See how NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to collect samples of the asteroid 1999 RQ36 will happen in this Space.com infographic.” data-options-closecontrol=”true” data-options-fullsize=”true”/>

Credit: Karl Tate/SPACE.com

To create this color composite, NASA scientists combined three images that were taken using three different color filters. They then color corrected the resulting image of Earth and brightened the moon to make it more easily visible. NASA featured the image online on Tuesday (Jan. 2).

“OSIRIS-REx is a mission to figure out where we came from, as asteroids are remnants from the formation of our solar system. But while the spacecraft might tell us some things about where we have been and where we are headed, it also can remind us of where we are right now,” NASA officials said in a statement.

After OSIRIS-REx approaches asteroid Bennu in August of this year, it will spend another 18 months in orbit, studying the asteroid. In 2020, it will attempt to collect a sample of the asteroid before heading back to Earth.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.