NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Beams Back the Sharpest Images of Jupiter—Ever

Juno flew by Jupiter in March of 2017 skimming 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops while traveling about 129,000 mph (208,000 km/h) relative to the planet, NASA officials said.  Hold my coffee, I can’t stop staring at the images. Is that even real?

NASA’s Juno spacecraft is the first solar-powered space probe sent out to study our solar system’s largest planet—Jupiter. Juno’s mission is to orbit the gas giant in polar orbit and study its structure while mapping its gravity and magnetic field. Studying Jupiter will allow experts to better understand large planets discovered across the cosmos.

So far—the US$1 billion spacecraft has managed to take an image of Jupiter’s poles for the first time, it has come across really bizarre cloud formations, heard and recorded mysterious auroras, and scanned deep into the planet’s thick cloud tops, doing what no other spacecraft has done before. We’re proud of you Juno.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/John Landino

And while science is the most important thing on the mission, NASA’s spacecraft are known for being really good photographers.

Just as the Cassini spacecraft recently beamed back unprecedented images of Saturn, Juno also has its fair share of breathtaking images—is it time we should award a  Pulitzer Prize for Photography to one of those spacecraft?

Juno is the ninth probe from Earth sent to Jupiter, and only the second probe to orbit the planet, but it is the first probe to snap unprecedently beautiful images of the gas giant.

Juno flew by Jupiter in March of 2017 skimming 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops while traveling about 129,000 mph (208,000 km/h) relative to the planet, NASA officials said. As it whizzed passed the Gas Giant it captured this image. JunoCam took close-up color photos of the mysterious and massive planet.

Hold my coffee, I can’t stop staring at the images. Is that even real?

NASA/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko

Jupiter is so sexy!

The craft’s next flyby will take place on May 19, and it will eventually descend into Jupiter’s atmosphere at some point in 2018 at the end of its mission. According to NASA, the spacecraft is expected to plunge into Jupiter in February of 2018, crash-landing after 20 months in orbit.

(Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstaedt/John Rogers)

NASA’s US$1 billion Juno spacecraft, launched in August 2011 and traveled five years to reach and settle into orbit around the gas giant—located 670 million kilometers from Earth.

I expect that the next batch of images will be even more incredible.
SOURCE: Ancient-code

The Event Horizon of a Black Hole May Have Just Been Captured for the First Time

Scientists around the globe have spent numerous sleepless nights just watching the abyss in the hope that they would capture an event that might change physics forever, the first photograph of the event horizon of a black hole.

Edge of Black Hole Would Reveal If Einstein Were Correct

If they have succeeded we may just be on the verge of seeing an elusive black holes edge, which would reveal if the fundamentals of general relativity do hold fast under some of the most extreme of conditions. However, there is some bad news, and this is that there is going to be a long wait to find out if the worldwide telescope network actually managed to capture an image.

Astronomers around the globe have completed five long nights of watching two black holes and data to the tune of 1,024 hard drives will come from the Event Horizon Telescope processing center at MIT Haystack along with the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. Only then will scientists and astronomers be able to study them to find out if an image has been captured.

The biggest challenge is that the hard drives from the South Pole Telescope are not going to be flown out until October, at the close of winter. This means that it isn’t going be until late on this year, or possibly 2018 until the answers are revealed, so there is a long on the edge of the seat wait.

Photographs Would Turn Black Hole from Mythical to Concrete

Heino Falcke is one of the astronomers involved in the project from Radboud University in the Netherlands. He said that even though data hasn’t been seen, any observations of black holes is going to take them from being mythical objects and turn them into something concrete that scientists and astronomers can study.

He went on to say even if the first photos that came out turned out to not be up to much and were washed out, it would allow scientists to test, for the first time, some of Einstein’s basic prediction of the theory of gravity in such an extreme environment as that of a black hole.

Black holes have been one of the most elusive and fascinating objects throughout the universe. Even though they have long been suspected of lurking within the center of most galaxies, no one has been able to take a photograph to prove they are real.

The name, of course, gives some clues, black holes, are extremely dark and they are massive, so big in fact that they consume everything that goes past their event horizon, this includes light, which has in the past made it impossible for scientists and astronomers to photograph.

A Collection of Telescopes Hope to Capture Event Horizon of Black Hole

Instead of using only one telescope, in this latest attempt to capture it on film, the international teams used a network of radio telescopes which had been placed around the planet, including the US, South Pole, Chile and the French Alps. Together they are known as Event Horizon Telescope. 

They work thanks to a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry, aka VLBI. This means the large network of receivers is all able to focus on radio waves that are emitted by a particular object in space at any one time. In this case, it was Sagittarius A, the black hole found in the middle of the Milky Way, along with another which is in the middle of galaxy M87.

The telescopes, when combined, can reach a resolution of 50 microarcseconds, which is the same as being able to see a grapefruit if it was on the moon’s surface. It is hoped that this is going to be ample to capture an image of the event horizon of Sagittarius A, 20 million km across, which is barely just a pinprick in the night sky, a distance of 26,000 light-years away from the Earth.

Was Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity Correct?

While the telescope had been given the approval to be turned on for ten days, bad weather conditions meant that five nights were only available to the researchers. What will be revealed if the project has been successful will all depend on whether Einstein was correct? Researchers have said that the black hole should look like a bright ring of light around the dark blob. With light coming from gas and dust particles having accelerated to high speed before then being ripped apart and finally consumed by the black hole. The blob would be a shadow that would be cast over the chaos.

What would be even more impressive would be if the scientists are able to measure the dark shadow that is cast by the black hole. Scientists have warned that they may see something else entirely and if so the theory of general relativity of Einstein would have to be overhauled completely.
SOURCE: Disclose.tv

Volcanic Activity on Ancient Mars May Have Produced Organic Life

New research suggests that active volcanoes on the Red Planet could have created an environment habitable to ancient microbes.

Olympus Mons on Mars.| NASA

Even a cursory look at a global map of Mars reveals how huge its volcanoes are. The famous Olympus Mons rises three times higher than Mt. Everest, and is just one of several volcanoes that adorn the Red Planet’s famous Tharsis ridge. Presumably, when these volcanoes were more actively spewing gases such as carbon monoxide and sulfur, they must have had a determining influence on the Martian atmosphere.

A new paper in the journal Icarus suggests that these volcanoes may in fact have created an environment habitable to ancient microbes. Specifically, a new model showing a range of volcanic eruptions shows that Mars' atmosphere could have been made anoxic, with depleted levels of oxygen and limited oxygen-based reactions.

“These results imply that ancient Mars should have experienced periods with anoxic and reducing atmospheres even through the mid-Amazonian whenever volcanic outgassing was sustained at sufficient levels,” the researchers wrote. “Reducing anoxic conditions are potentially conducive to the synthesis of prebiotic organic compounds, such as amino acids, and are therefore relevant to the possibility of life on Mars.”

"This is important from an astrobiology standpoint because these reducing anoxic conditions have been hypothesized as being important to the origin of life on the early Earth," said lead author Stephen Sholes, a Ph.D. candidate in earth and space sciences and astrobiology at the University of Washington, said in an e-mail to Seeker.

He pointed out that the famous Urey-Miller experiments of the 1950s showed that electrical pulses, in an environment with a reducing atmosphere and liquid water, produced complex organic molecules. By contrast, an oxidizing atmosphere would also oxidize these molecules, making them less useful in supporting the formation of life.

While volcanism on the Red Planet has been discussed for decades, Sholes said his research is different because it is quantifying how much volcanism is required to create reducing atmospheres on Mars. Specifically, his work delves into what it would take to do so, whether it is feasible, and how it could be detected.

NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft is providing information on the Martian atmosphere today, but will not really help with learning about past conditions related to volcanic activity. | NASA

Another difference is the approach itself. Other models that discuss volcano-atmosphere reactions on Mars focus on how the planet could be warmed, Sholes said, using outgassed volcanic gasses.

"Yes, you need liquid water, but you also need appropriate conditions for life, and here we are finding that the volcanoes should have changed the atmosphere enough to be more conducive to forming complex bio-important molecules," he said.

If the atmosphere was anoxic, scientists may be able to see the evidence on the ground, even billions of years later. That's because anoxic conditions should alter the types of minerals and rocks that form, allowing for testable predictions for future Mars missions. Examples include minerals made of ferrous iron — such as siderite, or iron carbonate — as well as elemental sulfur.

"Our results show that, given models for volcanic activity, during periods of sustained volcanism, Mars’ atmosphere could easily shift towards reducing and anoxic conditions, thus producing measurable amounts of elemental sulfur deposits," Sholes said.

He added that elemental sulfur has not been found yet on Mars, but it is a difficult mineral to study.

"The measurement techniques used could actually cause it to breakdown into smaller molecules that could be misidentified," he said.

Two missions are specifically investigating the Martian atmosphere right now. NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), which primarily examines atmospheric loss, and the European Space Agency's TGO (Trace Gas Orbiter), which looks at minority molecules in the Martian atmosphere.

Sholes said the atmosphere does not preserve tracers of past reducing conditions, so the current missions would not help us learn directly about past volcanic activity. Their measurements will help refine the atmospheric models used, however.

"Eventually we would like to update the model to test how single eruption events would change the atmosphere and the timescales involved," he added. "Our current model assumes constant volcanic eruptions, which wouldn’t necessarily be the case. If we could test individual eruptions, we could learn how big of an eruption would be required to switch the atmosphere anoxic, and how long that atmosphere would last before it would switch back."
SOURCE: https://www.seeker.com/space/planets/volcanic-activity-on-ancient-mars-may-have-produced-organic-life