Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 651

Russia is going back to the moon this year, ,

Russia is revisiting its Soviet space heritage for a new series of missions that will take the nation back to the moon.

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Galaxies, the cosmic cities of the universe, explained by astrophysicist, ,

Galaxies are glittering cities, massive metropolises full of stars, dust, gas, black holes, magnetic fields, cosmic rays, dark matter and more.

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St. Vincent’s La Soufriere volcano eruption spotted from space (photos), ,

New satellite imagery captures the relentless eruptions of the La Soufriere volcano on St. Vincent, which began on Friday (April 9).

La Soufriere, which last erupted in 1979, is located on the eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent. After decades of inactivity, the volcano started rumbling late last year, when scientists noticed a new lava dome had formed, oozing lava in the volcano’s summit crater.

Satellites operated by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Maxar Technologies have been tracking the La Soufriere volcano as it continues to spew smoke and debris miles high into the atmosphere, blanketing surrounding communities and creating heavy ashfall since its initial eruption on April 9.

Video: St. Vincent volcano’s periodic eruptions seen from space
Related: Amazing images of volcanoes from space

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Maxar’s WorldView-2 satellite captured stunning aerial views of the volcano as billows of smoke poured out over the main island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Maxar Technologies shared the satellite images of the area, which were taken on April 8, when the local government issued evacuation orders for people in areas surrounding the volcano, ahead of its eruption.

The company also shared satellite views of the town of Richmond Vale before and after the volcano erupted. The GIF, which Maxar shared on Twitter, captures drastic atmospheric changes, as clear skies on April 2 quickly become shrouded by ash in photos taken Tuesday (April 13). Ash from the ongoing eruptions has spread hundreds of miles eastward, impacting the skies above neighboring Carribean islands.

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NOAA satellites have also recorded the aftermath of the volcanic explosion. A timelapse of images from the GOES East satellite captures plumes of ash and smoke above St. Vincent island, as the volcano continually erupted throughout the day on April 11.

“The volcano continues to periodically erupt, and volcanologists say the activity could continue for weeks,” the NOAA wrote on Twitter.

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The NOAA’s GOES-16 weather satellite captured an up-close view of one of the explosive eruptions that occurred over the weekend. The imagery, shared April 12, shows a massive burst of ash and debris, which extended thousands of feet in the atmosphere.

The GOES-16 satellite has been keeping a constant, watchful eye on the volcano since it first erupted. Satellite imagery from April 9 shows two views of the eruption: one captured in daytime true color, or “GeoColor,” imagery and another that shows the levels of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere as the volcano’s ash plume explodes above the island.

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The NASA-NOAA Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) has also been watching over the area, capturing nighttime views of St. Vincent, Guadeloupe and Barbados. Taken early Sunday morning (April 11), the image highlights the massive volcanic explosion over St. Vincent, as well as the ash clouds and gravity waves that extend to neighboring islands. The NOAA-20 satellite images were captured in “day-night band” using the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite.

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La Soufriere erupted again on Tuesday (April 13), marking the fifth-straight day of explosions. Satellites will continue to observe the eruptions from space.

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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St. Vincent’s La Soufrière volcano eruption spotted from space (photos), ,

New satellite imagery captures the relentless eruptions of the La Soufrière volcano on St. Vincent, which began April 9.

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Blue Origin to launch ‘astronaut rehearsal’ New Shepard test flight today. How to watch live., ,

Blue Origin plans to launch an uncrewed test flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle today (April 14), and you can watch the action live online.

The company, which is led by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, will launch New Shepard from its West Texas site on Wednesday during a window that opens at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT; 8 a.m. local time), if all goes according to plan.

You can watch it on this page and here, as well as on the Space.com homepage, starting an hour before liftoff, courtesy of Blue Origin, or directly via the company. Blue Origin’s webcast is currently scheduled to begin at 10:15 a.m. EDT (1415 GMT), which the company has said would mark one hour before liftoff.

Blue Origin is developing New Shepard, a reusable rocket-capsule combo, to take paying customers and payloads on brief trips to suborbital space. Wednesday’s flight, known as NS-15, won’t carry any people, but it will be a substantial step toward crewed operations.

Related: Blue Origin’s NS-11 New Shepard test flight in photos

“During the mission, astronaut operational exercises will be conducted in preparation for human spaceflight,” Blue Origin representatives wrote in a mission description.

“The primary operations will entail Blue Origin personnel standing in as astronauts entering into the capsule prior to launch,” they added. “These astronauts will climb the launch tower, get into their seats, buckle their harnesses and conduct a communications check from their seat with CAPCOM, the Capsule Communicator.”

The Blue Origin personnel will depart the New Shepard capsule before launch. After landing, they’ll get back into the capsule to rehearse exit procedures, according to the description.

NS-15 will be the 15th New Shepard flight overall and the second for NS-4, the new and upgraded vehicle that’s expected to be the first to carry astronauts. Like NS-4’s initial flight, which occurred in January, Wednesday’s test mission will carry aloft Blue Origin’s instrument-laden dummy, Mannequin Skywalker, and thousands of postcards, the mission description states.

These postcards were sent in by students around the world via Blue Origin’s nonprofit organization, Club for the Future, which organized such operations on several previous New Shepard flights as well.

Mike Wall is the author of “ Out There ” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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On This Day in Space! April 14, 1981: 1st space shuttle mission lands, ,

On April 14, 1981, the first space shuttle mission returned to Earth after a two-day flight in space. The space shuttle Columbia safely touched down on Rogers dry lake at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where hundreds of thousands of people showed up to watch. Only two astronauts were on the shuttle: the pilot, Bob Crippen, and the commander, John Young.

Since this was the maiden voyage of the space shuttle, the only objective for this mission was to see if the shuttle could safely carry the crew to orbit and bring them back down to Earth. Some anomalies were reported, but Columbia and its crew came home safely.

This was the first time NASA landed a spacecraft on wheels, and the success of that landing made the space shuttle Columbia the world’s first reusable space vehicle.

Catch up on our entire “On This Day In Space” series on YouTube with this playlist.

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Still not enough space? Don’t forget to check out our Space Image of the Day, and on the weekends our Best Space Photos and Top Space News Stories of the week.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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Did lightning help spark life on Earth?, ,

It’s one of the longest-running mysteries of science: How did a jumble of elements undergo the right chemical reactions to spark life on Earth? The answer, it seems, is electrifying … literally.

Scientists think that, over time, lightning strikes on Earth — upwards of a quintillion times (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) over a billion years — could have “unlocked” phosphorous, a biomolecule integral to the origin of life on our planet, researchers at Yale suggest in a new study.

“This work helps us understand how life may have formed on Earth and how it could still be forming on other, Earth-like planets,” lead author Benjamin Hess, a graduate student in Yale’s Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, said in a statement.

Related: Strange chemical in Venus clouds defies explanation. A sign of life?

Phosphorous is a necessary ingredient for life as we know it on Earth. Scientists even search for phosphorous when looking for signs of extraterrestrial life out in the cosmos. However, billions of years ago, phosphorous was trapped inside insoluble minerals, making it fairly inaccessible. This has puzzled scientists for years as they’ve wondered how phosphorous could have transitioned into a more usable form to actually create life.

Researchers think that the phosphorous that helped to create life on Earth could have come from schreibersite, a rare mineral that’s common in meteorites and that can form in glasses, called fulgurites, when lightning strikes the ground. Schreibersite is soluble in water, so that would mean that with the presence of water, the phosphorous in that mineral would become accessible and could be a part of chemical reactions.

While some researchers have suggested that phosphorous schreibersite crashed to Earth in meteorites, other scientists have found that there weren’t enough meteorite impacts during the time period 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago when life is thought to have originated on our planet.

In their new study, Hess and colleagues suggest that the Earth’s phosphorous could have come from schreibersite created in lightning strikes. They think that this is more likely than the element coming from meteorites because the annual number of lightning strikes would’ve been relatively constant compared with meteorite impacts.

“It makes lightning strikes a significant pathway toward the origin of life,” Hess said.

The team used computer modeling to estimate how many lightning flashes occurred during the critical period when life is thought to have begun on Earth. They found that 1 to 5 billion of these lightning strikes likely happened every year, of those flashes, 100 million to 1 billion strikes would have hit the ground every year. For comparison, the Earth currently experiences about 560 million lightning strikes per year.

According to the study’s estimates, this would add up to 0.1 to 1 quintillion lightning flashes over a billion years, according to the study. Hess and team think that with so many lightning strikes, over this course of time the lightning hitting the ground would’ve created schreibersite, which in the presence of water would have accessible phosphorous that could take part in chemical reactions. For this reason, they think that the lightning strikes during this time period could have helped to create enough accessible phosphorous to explain the presence of phosphorous at the time when life originated on Earth.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Weird ‘blue’ dunes speckle the surface of Mars in NASA photo, ,

What might look like a scene from a science fiction film is actually a real-life image of dunes speckling the surface of Mars.

The gorgeous photo from NASA’s Odyssey orbiter released April 8 reveals the extreme and varying temperatures in a sea of dunes at Mars’ northern polar cap, which are formed into long and weaving lines by winds over time. The Red Planet does not actually have blue patches; the blue regions in this false-color image represent colder areas, and warmer features are seen as a yellowish-orange color, NASA officials said.

The image depicts an area about 19 miles (30 kilometers) wide, but the total scope of dunes at Mars’ northern polar cap stretches out much farther, covering an area the size of Texas.

In photos: Mars caves and lava tubes

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Blue dunes on the surface of Mars as seen by NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

Sand dunes can be found in various locations around the Red Planet. From the polar region depicted in this image to the floors of craters and more, Mars’ dunes are fascinating features on the planet’s surface. Some of the dunes on the planet have even been spotted covered in frost, which comes and goes with the seasons.

While NASA released the new image April 8, it is composed of images captured from December 2002 to November 2004 by the THEMIS (Thermal Emission Imaging System) instrument on board NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter. The image is part of a set of photos released recently to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Odyssey, which launched on April 7, 2001 and began observing Mars in October of that year.

Odyssey is stilly studying the Red Planet; it holds the record for the longest active spacecraft continuously orbiting another planet. The craft’s primary mission has been to study Mars’ environment and collect data to inform and protect future Mars missions. Aside from THEMIS, the craft carries instruments called GRS (Gamma Ray Spectrometer) and MARIE ( Mars Radiation Environment Experiment).

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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SpaceX will launch Astrobotic lander to the moon with NASA’s ice-sniffing VIPER rover, ,

NASA has a launcher for its ice-hunting rover that will land on the moon in 2023.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket — the same booster type that once sent the “Starman” mannequin to space in a Tesla Roadster — will send the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the moon, on private company Astrobotic’s lunar landing system.

Astrobotic’s contract with NASA required the Pennsylvania-based company to independently select a launch contractor, and it chose SpaceX through a competitive procurement.

As with previous Falcon Heavy missions, SpaceX will launch VIPER from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center near Orlando, Florida — a longtime launching location of moon missions, including the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972.

Related: NASA picks SpaceX Falcon Heavy to launch 1st Gateway station pieces to the moon

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A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 6, 2018. (Image credit: SpaceX)

VIPER is a key element of NASA’s long-term plans to plant humans on the moon later in the decade — as soon as 2024 if the Donald Trump-era deadline remains under the new Joe Biden presidential administration. The NASA Artemis program will see crews of humans working alongside robotics to explore the moon and its resources, using NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Key among the Artemis program’s goals is to learn how to live off the moon sustainably, potentially using resources such as lunar water ice at the moon’s south pole to help astronauts and machinery function adequately for longer missions on the lunar surface. Humans last visited the moon during the Apollo missions, only staying for a few days at a time and bringing everything they needed from Earth.

“Gaining a better learning of resources on the moon is critical to advancing humanity’s reach beyond Earth, and we are honored to support this exciting mission and NASA’s CLPS program,” Stephanie Bednarek, SpaceX senior director of commercial sales, said in a statement.

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NASA’s ice-hunting VIPER moon rover will ride a commercial Astrobotic Griffin lander to the moon in 2023. (Image credit: Astrobotic)Image 2 of 7

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NASA’s ice-hunting VIPER moon rover will ride a commercial Astrobotic Griffin lander to the moon in 2023. (Image credit: Astrobotic)Image 3 of 7

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NASA’s ice-hunting VIPER moon rover will ride a commercial Astrobotic Griffin lander to the moon in 2023. (Image credit: Astrobotic)Image 4 of 7

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NASA’s ice-hunting VIPER moon rover will ride a commercial Astrobotic Griffin lander to the moon in 2023. (Image credit: Astrobotic)Image 5 of 7

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NASA’s ice-hunting VIPER moon rover will ride a commercial Astrobotic Griffin lander to the moon in 2023. (Image credit: Astrobotic)Image 6 of 7

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An artist’s depiction of the VIPER moon spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA Ames/Daniel Rutter)Image 7 of 7

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An artist’s depiction of a NASA lunar rover called VIPER, which is designed to map where ice lurks under the moon’s surface. (Image credit: NASA Ames/Daniel Rutter)

Astrobotic received a task order from NASA in 2020 to send VIPER to the same approximate region as the first planned lunar landing mission with astronauts, called Artemis 3, in the south pole region of the moon. The mission plan calls for the Falcon Heavy to launch Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander towards the moon; Griffin will then touch down on the surface and provide a platform from which VIPER can disembark to move around autonomously.

No American hardware has landed softly on the moon for decades, but VIPER could be Astrobotic’s second effort if its Peregrine lander touches down safely in July at Lacus Mortis, a hexagonal-shaped plain on the near side of moon. Peregrine, if successful, would be the first-ever commercial American lander on the moon — and the first United States spacecraft to touch down at all since Apollo 17 in 1972.

For VIPER, Astrobotic said it was looking for a “complete mission solution” to make sure that all pieces of the launching and landing process are ready to bring the rover to the south pole.

“SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy completes our … solution by providing a proven launch vehicle to carry us on our trajectory to the moon. SpaceX has the team, vehicle, and facilities to make this happen,” Daniel Gillies, mission director for Astrobotic, said in the same statement.

The Griffin lunar lander is going through qualification testing and should be finished that process around the end of 2021, Astrobotic added in the statement. Griffin will be a hefty lander capable of supporting the 1,000 lbs. (450 kilograms) VIPER; Astrobotic’s overall fixed-cost contract with NASA for the mission is $199.5 million, covering everything from launch to landing.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Alien hunters should search for artifacts on the moon, study suggests, ,

The famous equation used to search for alien civilizations has now inspired a new formula to hunt for alien artifacts within our solar system.

The quest for these alien artifacts could start with the moon and other cosmic bodies near Earth, a new study finds.

The Drake Equation is used to estimate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way one can detect via their broadcast signals — or, more simply put, the odds of finding intelligent life in our galaxy. First proposed by radio astronomer Frank Drake in 1961, the equation calculates the number of communicating civilizations by analyzing several variables, such as the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life and the number of planets, per stellar system, with an environment suitable for life.

Related: 13 ways to hunt intelligent aliens

Currently, virtually all SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) experiments scan the skies looking for radio or light signals. However, over the years, some researchers have suggested that another, potentially better way to find evidence of alien life is to not look for broadcasts from afar, but instead to hunt for what are essentially messages in a bottle — a SETA (search for extraterrestrial artifacts) approach.

For example, in 2004, researchers suggested that broadcasting a signal across the cosmos is expensive and inefficient. Instead, the scientists calculated that inscribing messages onto a hunk of matter and launching it at potential extraterrestrial pen pals would require about a trillionth as much energy.

Another concern with conventional SETI is that extraterrestrial civilizations may be long dead by the time astronomers do actually detect signals from them. In contrast, extraterrestrial artifacts could provide a way for us to directly learn about alien civilizations, especially if these artifacts are equipped with artificial intelligence, study author James Benford, a physicist at Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California, told Space.com.

In the new study, Benford developed a version of the Drake equation for artifacts. The new formula specifically focused on what he calls “lurkers” — hidden and likely robotic extraterrestrial probes. Although the civilizations that deployed these lurkers may well be dead, the lurkers themselves could still be active enough to communicate with us.

A key difference between a SETA strategy and conventional SETI approaches “is how it [SETA] involves actively looking for evidence instead of passive observations,” Benford said. “The SETI community as a whole would need to think a new way.”

When Benford compared his formula with the Drake equation, he suggested the potential success rate of SETA was competitive with conventional SETI. For example, if an alien civilization noted that artifacts were likely a more cost-effective contact strategy than broadcasts, then SETA would prove more successful than conventional SETI. However, if an alien civilization was much like ours in that it was only capable of spaceflight at interplanetary speeds, then it might only ever build beacons instead of interstellar probes, and conventional SETI would prove more successful than SETA.

Extraterrestrial civilizations that passed near the sun might have been especially interested in launching probes at the solar system, Benford said. He noted that about two stars come within one light-year of the solar system per million years, and about one star comes within 10 light-years every 5,000 years. The most recent close encounter the solar system had was with Scholz’s Star, which came within 0.82 light-years of the sun about 70,000 years ago.

“On the 10,000-year timescale of agricultural civilizations on Earth, about two stars have come within 10 light-years,” Benford said.

Related: 10 exoplanets that could host alien life

Benford suggested first analyzing lunar images for signs of extraterrestrial probes. He noted that NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken about 2 million photos of the moon since 2009 “with resolution down to about a foot (0.3 meters),” Benford said. “You can see Neil Armstrong’s footprints on the moon in some photos, but only a handful of these images have been inspected by human eyes. We need to use AI [artificial intelligence] software to look for structures, for signs of artificiality, which could benefit sciences on Earth, such as archaeology.”

Benford also suggested looking for alien artifacts located on other bodies near Earth. These include Earth’s Trojan objects (bodies located at points in space where Earth and the sun’s gravitational pull balance out) and Earth’s co-orbital objects (those sharing Earth’s zone around the sun).

“China is planning a mission, ZhengHe, to one of these co-orbital objects, 2016 HO 3, for launch in 2024,” Benford said. “It’s going to come within 10 times Earth’s distance to the moon.”

Benford would not suggest looking on Earth itself. “If an artifact has been here a long time, it’s been subject to the weather, damage, theft, or decay due to the elements,” Benford said. “Over hundreds or thousands or millions of years, they’re likely not really discoverable, whereas someplace like the moon — they could still be there.”

All in all, “we can get a yes-no answer to part of the SETI question by searching nearby Earth, and we can do it with experiments, not just waiting for signals,” Benford said. “SETI asks, ‘Where are they?’ Well, maybe they’re right next door.”

Benford detailed his findings online March 18 in the journal Astrobiology. He will also discuss his idea with Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million, 10-year search for intelligent life in the universe announced in 2015 by famed scientist Stephen Hawking and other researchers.

Originally published on Space.com.

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