It wasn’t long after the discovery of exo-solar planets that scientists sent up spacecraft to look for them. The Kepler Space Telescope (KST) was NASA’s first planet finder, which has been exceeding expectations since 2009. It likely won’t get to continue on that road, as it is nearing the end of it’s life. At the same time, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is just starting to open it’s eyes. Today we say goodbye to one great planet hunter and hello to another. KST is part of NASA’s early 2000s spacecraft approvals that saw relatively inexpensive missions pushed forward...
Mars is a planet wide desert with underground and polar cap water, but it’s general arid environment and occasional wind give rise to dusty weather events such as tornado-like dust devils and local dust storms. Every so often, one of these little dust storms expands and becomes a planet wide phenomena, and in early June this is exactly what happened. So what does it mean for our rovers and orbiters? Global dust storms are a recurring phenomenon on Mars, and happen regularly about the planet regardless of season. Every 3-4 Martian years (6-8 Earth years) one of these smaller storms...
On the golden record that accompanies the Voyager spacecraft, there is a map showing the location of Earth. It’s not a road map that you might pull out when navigating a city, but a 3D map showing the location of a star, the Sun, in a populous galaxy. But just how would this map work? And more importantly, what are the map markers? If you notice the lines at the bottom left of the golden record image, they all intersect at a common center point. This is the Sun, and the lines extend out showing relative distances to the nearest...
Alliteration is accessible to all! Okay I’m done. Start some science! Really done this time. Today’s double post covers the smallest of stars, still larger than most planets, and the only weather Mercury will ever have. Humans are naturally interested in the extremes, the biggest, smallest, fastest, hottest, coldest, and every other characteristic outlier. With stars, being so huge and powerful, we are often more interested in the largest, hottest, and most energetic. Though on the opposite end of the spectrum, Cambridge University astronomers have discovered the smallest star in the known universe. The star, a red dwarf, has the...
The environment on the moon is pretty boring. Rocks, dust, and craters as far as the eye can see in all directions. Untouched for billions of years, save for meteors and a few recent visits by a blue neighbour. In 2009, the cold, dry surface of the moon was found to harbour trace amounts of water. Now, less than a decade later, the first map of lunar water has been produced. The map was produced with data taken by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the craft that discovered the water in 2009, along with a similar...
The Juno spacecraft began its long journey to Jupiter in 2011. Waking up in 2016 it underwent a successful orbit injection on July 4th. Now after nearly a year of waiting, the public finally gets to see the first fruits of the mission. It has certainly been worth the wait. A new Jupiter, seen from a distance of 52,000 Km, has a vivid and chaotic southern pole in the above image. Swirling storms thousands of kilometres across whirl around one another in a sea of gaseous ammonia clouds. Will the system remain chaotic? Or will it change a year from...
You’d think I would have learned my lesson by now. Every time I think I’ve seen it all, that I’ve seen every strange phenomenon in space, every unique planet, moon, star, galaxy, every variation, I’m proven wrong. I expect that the order has been established and everything newly discovered will fall into a category with no more unique variation. But here we are again. The close up view of Pan. Pan was photographed only a few days ago by the Cassini spacecraft as it carries out the final months of it’s mission to Saturn. It was revealed to be a...
Here is a map of the nations of the world that use the two systems of measurement. Metric shown in blue and imperial shown in red. While it’s not always good to go with the crowd, there is a reason why more nations use the metric system. An often-cited passage from the book Wild Thing by Josh Bazell: “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount...
How did supermassive black holes form in the early epochs of the universe? More importantly, how did they have enough time to grow as large as they did? The answer requires a very different universe. And back then, conditions were much different than they are now. There was a lot of gas, little dust, no stars, and a plethora of dark matter. Astronomers have spent decades observing early quasars, massive active galaxies powered by huge black holes feeding on surrounding gas. But these galaxies are seen so early in the universe’s history, one starts to wonder how a black hole finds sufficient...
As Canadians start up Canada day celebrations and Americans get ready for their independence day, the world of space exploration holds its breath and hopes for a good result. On July 4th, the Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter after a five year long journey. NASA continued its recent theme of producing movie-trailer-like videos to promote the mission. Although I love the imagery and the design of the trailer, it feels cheesy to me. Maybe it’s because I find movie trailers cheesy in general, and this is trying to appeal to the general public. Though regardless of how I feel,...
