NASA just released new, ultra-clear images of Ceres' mysterious bright spots

NASA just released new, ultra-clear images of Ceres' mysterious bright spots

What the hell is going on down there?

Last year, Ceres - a dwarf planet that sits between Mars and Jupiter - was the subject of intense debate as researchers all over the world tried to figure out what formed the planet’s mysterious white spots. Though that mystery is now pretty much solved, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft just sent back some of the clearest pictures of these bright spots ever taken. 

The new pictures, which were unveiled at the 47th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, were taken from a distance of 385 kilometres (240 miles) above the Occator Crater, a hole on the dwarf planet’s surface that stretches 92 kilometres across and 4 kilometres deep (57 x 2 miles). 

These new photos provide an unprecedented look inside the crater and its extremely bright centre. As planetary scientist Ralf Jaumann explains: 

"Before Dawn began its intensive observations of Ceres last year, Occator Crater looked to be one large bright area. Now, with the latest close views, we can see complex features that provide new mysteries to investigate. The intricate geometry of the crater interior suggests geologic activity in the recent past, but we will need to complete detailed geologic mapping of the crater in order to test hypotheses for its formation."

Besides the crater photos, the team has also released a colour map of Ceres' surface that highlights what materials the dwarf planet’s made of and how craters are distributed around it. This data will help researchers understand what lies blow the Ceres' surface.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI

They also revealed that water has been found in the Oxo Crater by the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR), which is always big news. It turns out that Ceres is full of little mysteries other than its well-known, bright salt patches.

The new data will enable researchers to further understand how Ceres formed, how much water is hidden there and, of course, more information on its weird regions like Occator Crater.

As Jamie Condliffe explains at Gizmodo, while astronomers are now confident that the bright spots on the Occator Crater are made from salt, it recently came to light that they seem to be constantly changing, and no one's quite sure how or why.

"We're excited to unveil these beautiful new images, especially Occator, which illustrate the complexity of the processes shaping Ceres' surface," said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the mission. "Now that we can see Ceres' enigmatic bright spots, surface minerals, and morphology in high resolution, we're busy working to figure out what processes shaped this unique dwarf planet."

You can view more of the newly released pictures here.

NASA's developing a decelerator that would replace parachutes in space vessels

NASA's developing a decelerator that would replace parachutes in space vessels

It'll be a rough landing on Mars.

NASA has developed a new decelerator that will be used in future space missions. It can work in extreme conditions and withstand packing and compression, resulting in a smaller footprint.

Historically, NASA has used decelerators to slow down space vessels as they prepare to land on Earth. Housed within the vessels, these decelerators generate drag and limit acceleration, working like a parachute.

NASA wants to ensure that decelerators used in future space missions will work in extreme conditions and withstand packing and compression. In order to achieve this, the agency created a scaled-down version of its latest Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, or HIAD, design to ensure that it will be able to tolerate the packing process.

Using a vacuum pump, NASA engineers were able to squeeze the 3-metre, donut-shaped inflatable into a vastly smaller space, an important quality considering the space premium in vessels. They then packed and unpacked it multiple times, checking for tears in its Zylon and Teflon materials at every step in the process.

NASA

Engineers at NASA foresee the viability of this technology in delivery of heavy cargo, science instruments, and people to other worlds. It could even be used to recover cargo from the International Space Station and return it to Earth.

According to Langley test engineer, Sean Hancock, HIAD was packed the same way each time to see how the material would handle folding, packing, and compressing. In doing so engineers develop a better understanding of how it would perform after exposure to handling, storage, and deployment during a space flight mission.

This development is also of great concern to NASA, as it anticipates future missions, especially manned ones, will require heavier vessels and ships. While a parachute has been used to bring down the Curiosity rover through the Martian atmosphere, a spacecraft containing astronauts and other materials could weigh 30 times more, necessitating better decelerators.

The HIAD would allow a slower descent of any vehicle through the atmosphere during future missions. In addition, the technology will protect the craft from the intense heat on the journey down. HIAD lead engineer, Keith Johnson, explained that the small test donut contained all the components for the latest design.

This test should allow NASA to develop a bigger prototype and bring us one step closer to settling the Red Planet.

This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.

Saturn's moons and rings could be younger than the dinosaurs, study reveals

Saturn's moons and rings could be younger than the dinosaurs, study reveals

100 million years, cosmically speaking, is super young.

When researchers talk about planets and moons forming, it’s usually an event that took place billions and billions of years ago - a timeframe that's so massive, it's hard for us to really comprehend. But that can no longer be said about Saturn’s famous moons and rings, because they might have formed a mere 100 million years ago, which makes them younger than most dinosaurs. 

According to researchers from the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), a new computer model shows evidence that Saturn’s inner moons and rings are actually a relatively modern creation, especially considering that Saturn itself, along with the other planets in our Solar System, formed some 4.5 billion years ago. 

The discovery came from analysing orbital data from the planet’s moons. Basically, since Saturn has so many moons flying around it, they have to share space, which means that the orbits of these moons are affected by each other. As time goes on, these orbits stretch out and grow.

So, based on that logic, the younger moons should have different, more ordinary orbits than the older moons, if they actually had billions of years to get weird. As SETI puts it:

"By comparing present orbital tilts and those predicted by computer simulations, the researchers could learn how much the orbits of Saturn’s moons grew. It turns out that for some of the most important satellites - Tethys, Dione, and Rhea - the orbits are less dramatically altered than previously thought."

With that observation, the researchers used data from NASA’s Cassini mission data to create simulations.

When all was said and done, the team found that many of Saturn’s moons - except the faraway ones like Titan - likely formed 100 million years ago, meaning that many of Saturn’s moons formed during Earth’s Cretaceous Period, the era during which many of your favourite dinosaurs were alive. 

It's hoped that the findings will help us judge the ages of other moons inside our Solar System and out.

It’s pretty crazy to think that moons were forming in our Solar System during a time on Earth that many of us can actually envision. It’s still a super-long time ago, but, cosmically speaking, it's like it only happened yesterday. 

You can read the full research article in the Astrophysical Journal. 

3 billion years ago, our Moon had a different north pole

3 billion years ago, our Moon had a different north pole

Like if Earth's axis moved from Antarctica to Australia.

It's easy to think of the Moon as a kind of dormant, predictable companion to all the hustle and bustle of life on our home planet, but a new study reveals there's a whole lot more going on under the surface of our lunar satellite than we might assume.
Scientists have discovered that the Moon wandered off its original axis more than 3 billion years ago, with the axis shifting about 6 degrees over the course of a billion years or so. That means the north and south poles of the Moon weren't always where they are right now.

 

"This was such a surprising discovery. We tend to think that objects in the sky have always been the way we view them, but in this case the face that is so familiar to us – the Man on the Moon – changed," says planetary scientist Matthew Siegler from the Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Siegler and his colleagues found evidence of the lunar shift while analysing NASA records of lunar polar hydrogen. The hydrogen is contained in ice deposits hidden in craters around the Moon's north and south poles, and the researchers detected an unusual offset of these ice deposits from the Moon's current north and south poles.
Taking a closer look at the data – gleaned from NASA's Lunar Prospector and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions – they found the ice offset at each pole amounted to the same distance, but travelling in exactly opposite directions.
James Keane/University of Arizona
In other words, the axis that runs through the Moon and around which it rotates had shifted in position, with the north and south poles adjusting to new locations on the lunar surface. While 6 degrees might not seem like a huge angle, it's a pretty massive transformation for something as big as the Moon. But how did it happen?
The answer, according to the researchers, is volcanic activity that took place under the lunar surface a long, long time before humans started gazing up at the Moon.

 

"Billions of years ago, heating within the Moon's interior caused the face we see to shift upward as the pole physically changed positions," said Siegler. "It would be as if Earth's axis relocated from Antarctica to Australia. As the pole moved, the Man on the Moon turned his nose up at Earth."
The phenomenon, called polar wander, is thought to have occurred when ancient volcanic activity some 3.5 billion years ago melted some of the Moon's mantle, leading it to bubble up toward the surface. This change in internal mass could have caused the whole Moon to move, slowly shifting the position and angle of its axis over a billion years, as now shown by etched ice paths on the surface.
The findings, published in Nature, help us to understand more about the nature of ice on the Moon, as we now know it predates the Moon's polar wander, indicating that it's very ancient. This in turn could help explain how we have water here on Earth, which is something that still puzzles scientists.
"We don't know where the Earth's water came from. It appears to have come from the outer Solar System well after the Earth and Moon formed," said Siegler. "The [Moon] ice may be a time capsule from the same source that supplied the original water to Earth. This is a record we don't have on Earth. Earth has reworked itself so many times, there's nothing that old left here. Ancient ice from the Moon could provide answers to this deep mystery."

This open-access picture book from the ‘70s shows how glorious the space race really was

This open-access picture book from the ‘70s shows how glorious the space race really was

Unbounding optimism.

The ‘70s were an exciting time for space exploration. We landed on the Moon in 1969, the Russian Mars 2 probe explored the surface of the red planet in 1973, and things were looking bright for future of space travel.
These recently uploaded - and incredible to look at - illustrations tell the story of the space race, showing just how optimistic we all were back then, as well as some of the cutting edge research and technology from the time.

 

English tea brand, Brooke Bond & Company, jumped on the space race bandwagon in 1971, creating a book and collectible tea card set about "The Race to Space". The book contained 50 tea cards - just like collectable baseball cards - based on different probes we’d sent out into the Solar System so far, such as the Apollo Lunar Module, the Lunar Roving Vehicle, and a hypothetical future manned flight to Mars.
Although we still haven’t actually made it to Mars yet, we definitely admire their optimism. Enquiring young minds could get these 50 tea cards by purchasing, as their namesake suggests, boxes of tea. Each packet of loose tea from Brooke Bond came with one of these cards, kind of like an even older-school version of those dumb toys you could get in cereal boxes and packets of chips (anyone remember Pogs?!).
Brooke Bond
These weren’t the first tea cards on the market, and certainly weren’t the last, with collectable cards spanning British Birds in 1964 all the way to 1999’s Oracle cards. When the Oracle cards got hot (like, say, by holding one over a cup of tea) the heat would change the card to revel a prediction. But 1971’s "The Race into Space" collection is definitely our favourite series, and we love all these incredible images of humankind’s journey into the cosmos.
You can see more high quality images and excerpts all free on Flickr.
Brooke Bond
But if reading is more your thing, IF Magazine is another science blast from the past that we can’t get over. Launched in March 1952 by Quinn Publications, the science fiction magazine was only ever moderately successful during its relatively short run, but the amazing illustrations and stories inside are timeless, and give a great insight into what we thought the future would look like, from more than half a century ago.
Check out the whole collection here.
IF Magazine, Jason Scott

NASA by 2022... for just $10 billionscientists say we could colonise the Moon

NASA by 2022... for just $10 billionscientists say we could colonise the Moon 

What are we waiting for ?

A lot of focus over the past 12 months has been on NASA's journey to Mars. But a group of space experts, including leading NASA scientists, has now produced a special journal edition that details how we could establish a human colony on the Moon in the next seven years - all for US$10 billion.

Although that's pretty awesome, the goal isn't really the Moon itself - from an exploratory point of view, most scientists have bigger targets in sight. But the lessons we'll learn and the technology we'll develop building a human base outside of Earth will eventually be the key to colonising Mars, and other planets, according to the experts.

"My interest is not the Moon. To me the Moon is as dull as a ball of concrete,"NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay, who edited the special, open-access issue of New Space journal, told Sarah Fecht over at Popular Science. "But we're not going to have a research base on Mars until we can learn how to do it on the Moon first. The Moon provides a blueprint to Mars."

The journal articles came out of a workshop held back in August 2014, when some of the greatest minds in space research and business were brought together to explore and develop low-cost options for building a human settlement on the Moon.

We haven't gone back to the Moon since 1972 simply because of how expensive it is - the Apollo program that put the first humans on the lunar surface would have cost US$150 billion by today's standards, Fecht reports. And with a budget of US$19.3 billion for the whole of 2016, NASA hasn't been able to consider the Moon as well as Mars.

But thanks to new technology, it no longer has to be that way.

"The US could lead a return of humans to the surface of the Moon within a period of 5-7 years from authority to proceed at an estimated total cost of about $10 billion (±30 percent)," conclude NASA's Alexandra Hall and NextGen Space's Charles Miller in one of the papers.

As Jurica Dujmovic notes for MarketWatch, that's cheaper than one US aircraft carrier. 

"The big takeaway," McKay told Popular Science, "is that new technologies, some of which have nothing to do with space - like self-driving cars and waste-recycling toilets - are going to be incredibly useful in space, and are driving down the cost of a moon base to the point where it might be easy to do."

NASA

According to the research papers, the lunar base would house around 10 people for stays of up to a year at first - and could eventually grow to a self-sufficient settlement of 100 within a decade. 

They'd get to the Moon on SpaceX's soon-to-be-launched Falcon Heavy, and while they'd have to take quite a lot of equipment on the first trip, 3D printing could be used to produce pretty much everything else once they get there.

The colony would most likely be established on the outer rim of one of the Moon's poles, which receive more sunlight than the rest of the surface, so would help keep solar-powered equipment running. As Marketwatch reports:

"Furthermore, all that energy could provide power for robots that would excavate large amounts of ice detected within the craters. Water gathered that way could then be used for life support, as well as for providing oxygen, or it could be processed into rocket fuel, which would be sold or stored for refuelling space crafts."

The astronauts would probably live in the something similar to Bigelow Aeropsace's inflatable habitat, the researchers write, which is radiation resistant and would allow for a range of living areas, as well as easy storing and transport.

It could also provide protected habitats for basic crops, which would be fertilised with the help of a toilet that recycles human waste into energy, clean water, and nutrients, such as the Gates Foundation-funded blue toilet.

BigelowAerospace

The rest of the food and supplies for 10 people that couldn't be grown and 3D printed on the Moon could be shipped by SpaceX for less than US$350 million per year using the reusable Falcon 9 rocket.

It all sounds amazing, but the elephant in the room is the fact that the US$10 million establishment cost is more than NASA's existing space flight budget of US$3-4 billion per year. But assuming setting up the colony is a flat fee, it's definitely still affordable and could run alongside plans to Mars, the scientists write.

And things could get even cheaper if commercial service providers are involved, which would then be prime position to sell propellant from the Moon's orbit to NASA and any other space agencies trying to get humans to Mars.

All of the papers in the special edition of New Space are freely available online for you to peruse and use to plan your future in space. Get dreaming, because it's closer than you think.

"It is time to go back to this Moon, this time to stay," concludes the journal's preface. "and funding is no longer the main hurdle."