KREUZADER (Posts tagged space)

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
lordtableshark
startswithabang

Seven planets, including three habitable ones, found around ultra-cool dwarf star

“Unlike the worlds in our Solar System, each one should be tidally locked to the parent star, meaning that the same side always sees “day” while the opposite side resides in eternal night. Yet life on Earth began in the oceans, and of these seven worlds, the fourth, fifth and sixth might all have conditions to support liquid oceans or lakes – if the atmosphere is favorable – bathed in eternal sunlight.”

What is it that makes our Solar System special? It’s Earth, of course. A rocky planet of the right mass and composition, the right distance from our Sun, the right atmosphere, the surface oceans, and all the life that’s ensued is what makes us special. Not just special, but unique, at least among the planets we’ve found so far. But there are other planetary systems out there with Earth-like worlds. Similar to Earth in mass, size, temperature and many other conditions, these might represent planets where life similar to what we find here arose. For the first time, we’ve found a planetary system with not just one Earth-like, potentially habitable world, but three!

Come meet the worlds around the ultra-cool star TRAPPIST-1, and learn what the prospects are for these worlds being truly Earth-like.

trappist-1 astronomy space nasa spitzer space telescope
These seven alien worlds could help explain how planets form“Seven alien, Earth-sized worlds bask in the cool, red light of their parent star. The planetary menagerie exists around a star overlooked by other exoplanet hunters, although it is just 12...

These seven alien worlds could help explain how planets form

Seven alien, Earth-sized worlds bask in the cool, red light of their parent star. The planetary menagerie exists around a star overlooked by other exoplanet hunters, although it is just 12 parsecs (39 light years) from Earth.

Astronomers have found other seven-planet systems before, but this is the first to have so many Earth-sized worlds. All of them orbit at the right distance to possibly have liquid water somewhere on their surfaces.

“To have this system of seven is really incredible,” says Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You can imagine how many nearby stars might harbour lots and lots of planets.”

Some of the planets were announced last year, but the authors debuted five newfound ones in a paper published on 22 February in Nature1. Because the system is so close to Earth, astronomers can study the planets’ atmospheres relatively easily. That could reveal an astonishing diversity of worlds, ranging in composition from rocky to icy.

“This system is going to be one of the best laboratories we have for understanding the evolution of small planets,” says Zachory Berta-Thompson, an astronomer at the University of Colorado Boulder.

It’s also vindication for astronomers who hunt for planets around the cool, dim stars known as M dwarfs. These are the most common type of star in the Milky Way, but many exoplanet searches have focused instead on bigger and brighter stars that more closely resemble the Sun. Even NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which found most of the more than 4,700 planetary candidates known so far, turned to M dwarfs only recently. “These small stars had been completely overlooked,” says Michaël Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium.

Source: nature.com
trappist-1 astronomy space exoplanets nasa spitzer space telescope
Dawn Discovers Evidence for Organic Material on Ceres“NASA’s Dawn mission has found evidence for organic material on Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists using the spacecraft’s...

Dawn Discovers Evidence for Organic Material on Ceres

NASA’s Dawn mission has found evidence for organic material on Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists using the spacecraft’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) detected the material in and around a northern-hemisphere crater called Ernutet. Organic molecules are interesting to scientists because they are necessary, though not sufficient, components of life on Earth.

The discovery adds to the growing list of bodies in the solar system where organics have been found. Organic compounds have been found in certain meteorites as well as inferred from telescopic observations of several asteroids. Ceres shares many commonalities with meteorites rich in water and organics – in particular, a meteorite group called carbonaceous chondrites. This discovery further strengthens the connection between Ceres, these meteorites and their parent bodies.

Source: nasa.gov
ceres dawn space nasa
SpaceX Launching Lightning Tracker, ‘Three-Eyed’ Raven, Deadly Superbug for NASA“ CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX is gearing up to launch its 10th commercial cargo mission on Saturday morning (Feb. 18), ferrying supplies and an assortment of science...

SpaceX Launching Lightning Tracker, ‘Three-Eyed’ Raven, Deadly Superbug for NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX is gearing up to launch its 10th commercial cargo mission on Saturday morning (Feb. 18), ferrying supplies and an assortment of science investigations to the International Space Station — including a deadly superbug, an advanced lightning sensor, a tool for new autonomous rendezvous capabilities and more.

Perched atop an upgraded Falcon 9 booster, the Dragon spacecraft will lift off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39A — marking the first time a vehicle has launched from the historic pad since the final, 2011 shuttle mission.

[…]

The next research investigation that was presented may sound like something out of a science-fiction horror story, but the researchers explained there’s no danger to the crew. As part of a NASA-funded study, led by Dr. Anita Goel, Nanobiosym is partnering with CASIS — the company tasked with managing the space station’s national laboratory — to send a batch of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (aka MRSA) into space, sealed in three levels of containment.

MRSA is common in hospitals, and in the United States alone, MRSA is notorious for killing more Americans in a single year than the combined total of deaths from emphysema, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s disease and homicide.

So why would NASA want to send such a deadly strain of bacteria into space? Dr. Goel explained that by exposing the bacteria to a microgravity environment, researchers may be able to better understand how MRSA mutates.

Source: space.com
nasa spacex international space station space
NASA’s Juno to Remain in Current Orbit at Jupiter“NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, which has been in orbit around the gas giant since July 4, 2016, will remain in its current 53-day orbit for the remainder of the mission. This will allow Juno to...

NASA’s Juno to Remain in Current Orbit at Jupiter

NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, which has been in orbit around the gas giant since July 4, 2016, will remain in its current 53-day orbit for the remainder of the mission. This will allow Juno to accomplish its science goals, while avoiding the risk of a previously-planned engine firing that would have reduced the spacecraft’s orbital period to 14 days.

“Juno is healthy, its science instruments are fully operational, and the data and images we’ve received are nothing short of amazing,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “The decision to forego the burn is the right thing to do – preserving a valuable asset so that Juno can continue its exciting journey of discovery.”

Source: jpl.nasa.gov
juno jupiter space nasa
Scientists make huge dataset of nearby stars available to public“Today, a team that includes MIT and is led by the Carnegie Institution for Science has released the largest collection of observations made with a technique called radial velocity, to...

Scientists make huge dataset of nearby stars available to public

Today, a team that includes MIT and is led by the Carnegie Institution for Science has released the largest collection of observations made with a technique called radial velocity, to be used for hunting exoplanets. The huge dataset, taken over two decades by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, is now available to the public, along with an open-source software package to process the data and an online tutorial.

By making the data public and user-friendly, the scientists hope to draw fresh eyes to the observations, which encompass almost 61,000 measurements of more than 1,600 nearby stars.

Source: news.mit.edu
astronomy exoplanets space
“This artist’s rendering illustrates a conceptual design for a potential future mission to land a robotic probe on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The lander is shown with a sampling arm extended, having previously excavated a small area on the...

This artist’s rendering illustrates a conceptual design for a potential future mission to land a robotic probe on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The lander is shown with a sampling arm extended, having previously excavated a small area on the surface. The circular dish on top is a dual-purpose high-gain antenna and camera mast, with stereo imaging cameras mounted on the back of the antenna. Three vertical shapes located around the top center of the lander are attachment points for cables that would lower the rover from a sky crane, which is envisioned as the landing system for this mission concept.

Source: nasa.gov
europa nasa jupiter space
carrionlaughing
womeninspace

NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg is a self proclaimed crafter. A week ago she made a stuffed dinosaur from scraps on the space station. The little T-rex is made form the lining of Russian food containers and the toy is stuffed with scraps from an old T-shirt. While many toys have flown into space, this is the first produced in space.

Photos: Karen Nyberg, via CollectSpace

carrionlaughing

SPACECRAFT

Source: pinterest.com
space nasa international space station
“A recently discovered solitary ice volcano on the dwarf planet Ceres may have some hidden older siblings, say scientists who have tested a likely way such mountains of icy rock – called cryovolcanoes – might disappear over millions of years. NASA’s...

A recently discovered solitary ice volcano on the dwarf planet Ceres may have some hidden older siblings, say scientists who have tested a likely way such mountains of icy rock – called cryovolcanoes – might disappear over millions of years.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft discovered Ceres’s 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) tall Ahuna Mons cryovolcano in 2015. Other icy worlds in our solar system, like Pluto, Europa, Triton, Charon and Titan, may also have cryovolcanoes, but Ahuna Mons is conspicuously alone on Ceres. The dwarf planet, with an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, also lies far closer to the sun than other planetary bodies where cryovolcanoes have been found.

Now, scientists show there may have been cryovolcanoes other than Ahuna Mons on Ceres millions or billions of years ago, but these cryovolcanoes may have flattened out over time and become indistinguishable from the planet’s surface. They report their findings in a new paper accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Source: news.agu.org
nasa space dawn ceres asteroid