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    • By NASA
      5 min read
      Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
      It’s a new year on Mars, and while New Year’s means winter in Earth’s northern hemisphere, it’s the start of spring in the same region of the Red Planet. And that means ice is thawing, leading to all sorts of interesting things. JPL research scientist Serina Diniega explains. NASA/JPL-Caltech Instead of a winter wonderland, the Red Planet’s northern hemisphere goes through an active — even explosive — spring thaw.
      While New Year’s Eve is around the corner here on Earth, Mars scientists are ahead of the game: The Red Planet completed a trip around the Sun on Nov. 12, 2024, prompting a few researchers to raise a toast.
      But the Martian year, which is 687 Earth days, ends in a very different way in the planet’s northern hemisphere than it does in Earth’s northern hemisphere: While winter’s kicking in here, spring is starting there. That means temperatures are rising and ice is thinning, leading to frost avalanches crashing down cliffsides, carbon dioxide gas exploding from the ground, and powerful winds helping reshape the north pole.
      “Springtime on Earth has lots of trickling as water ice gradually melts. But on Mars, everything happens with a bang,” said Serina Diniega, who studies planetary surfaces at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
      Mars’ wispy atmosphere doesn’t allow liquids to pool on the surface, like on Earth. Instead of melting, ice sublimates, turning directly into a gas. The sudden transition in spring means a lot of violent changes as both water ice and carbon dioxide ice — dry ice, which is much more plentiful on Mars than frozen water — weaken and break.
      “You get lots of cracks and explosions instead of melting,” Diniega said. “I imagine it gets really noisy.”
      Using the cameras and other sensors aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which launched in 2005, scientists study all this activity to improve their understanding of the forces shaping the dynamic Martian surface. Here’s some of what they track.
      Frost Avalanches
      In 2015, MRO’s High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured a 66-foot-wide (20-meter-wide) chunk of carbon dioxide frost in freefall. Chance observations like this are reminders of just how different Mars is from Earth, Diniega said, especially in springtime, when these surface changes are most noticeable.
      Martian spring involves lots of cracking ice, which led to this 66-foot-wide (20-meter-wide) chunk of carbon dioxide frost captured in freefall by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2015NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona “We’re lucky we’ve had a spacecraft like MRO observing Mars for as long as it has,” Diniega said. “Watching for almost 20 years has let us catch dramatic moments like these avalanches.”
      Gas Geysers
      Diniega has relied on HiRISE to study another quirk of Martian springtime: gas geysers that blast out of the surface, throwing out dark fans of sand and dust. These explosive jets form due to energetic sublimation of carbon dioxide ice. As sunlight shines through the ice, its bottom layers turn to gas, building pressure until it bursts into the air, creating those dark fans of material.
      As light shines through carbon dioxide ice on Mars, it heats up its bottom layers, which, rather than melting into a liquid, turn into gas. The buildup gas eventually results in explosive geysers that toss dark fans of debris on to the surface.light shines through carbon dioxide ice on Mars But to see the best examples of the newest fans, researchers will have to wait until December 2025, when spring starts in the southern hemisphere. There, the fans are bigger and more clearly defined.
      Spiders
      Another difference between ice-related action in the two hemispheres: Once all the ice around some northern geysers has sublimated in summer, what’s left behind in the dirt are scour marks that, from space, look like giant spider legs. Researchers recently re-created this process in a JPL lab.
      Sometimes, after carbon dioxide geysers have erupted from ice-covered areas on Mars, they leave scour marks on the surface. When the ice is all gone by summer, these long scour marks look like the legs of giant spiders.NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona Powerful Winds
      For Isaac Smith of Toronto’s York University, one of the most fascinating subjects in springtime is the Texas-size ice cap at Mars’ north pole. Etched into the icy dome are swirling troughs, revealing traces of the red surface below. The effect is like a swirl of milk in a café latte.
      “These things are enormous,” Smith said, noting that some are a long as California. “You can find similar troughs in Antarctica but nothing at this scale.”
      As temperatures rise, powerful winds kick up that carve deep troughs into the ice cap of Mars’ north pole. Some of these troughs are as long as California, and give the Martian north pole its trademark swirls. This image was captured by NASA’s now-inactive Mars Global Surveyor.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Fast, warm wind has carved the spiral shapes over eons, and the troughs act as channels for springtime wind gusts that become more powerful as ice at the north pole starts to thaw. Just like the Santa Ana winds in Southern California or the Chinook winds in the Rocky Mountains, these gusts pick up speed and temperature as they ride down the troughs — what’s called an adiabatic process.
      Wandering Dunes
      The winds that carve the north pole’s troughs also reshape Mars’ sand dunes, causing sand to pile up on one side while removing sand from the other side. Over time, the process causes dunes to migrate, just as it does with dunes on Earth.
      This past September, Smith coauthored a paper detailing how carbon dioxide frost settles on top of polar sand dunes during winter, freezing them in place. When the frost all thaws away in the spring, the dunes begin migrating again.
      Surrounded by frost, these Martian dunes in Mars’ northern hemisphere were captured from above by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its HiRISE camera on Sept. 8, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona Each northern spring is a little different, with variations leading to ice sublimating faster or slower, controlling the pace of all these phenomena on the surface. And these strange phenomena are just part of the seasonal changes on Mars: the southern hemisphere has its own unique activity.
      More About MRO
      The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
      For more information, visit:
      https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-reconnaissance-orbiter
      News Media Contacts
      Andrew Good
      Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
      818-393-2433
      andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
      Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
      NASA Headquarters, Washington
      202-358-1600
      karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
      2024-177
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      Details
      Last Updated Dec 20, 2024 Related Terms
      Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars Explore More
      5 min read Cutting-Edge Satellite Tracks Lake Water Levels in Ohio River Basin
      Article 3 days ago 5 min read NASA Mars Orbiter Spots Retired InSight Lander to Study Dust Movement
      Article 4 days ago 5 min read NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reaches Top of Jezero Crater Rim
      Article 1 week ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
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      View the full article
    • By NASA
      2 min read
      Jovian Vortex Hunters Spun Up Over New Paper
      Jumping Jupiter! The results are in, storm chasers! Thanks to your help over the last two years the Jovian Vortex Hunter project has published a catalog of 7222 vortices, which you can download here. Each vortex is an enormous swirling windstorm in Jupiter’s atmosphere–terrifying yet beautiful to behold.
      The vortices are labeled by color (“white” is most common, then “dark”, then “red”).
      The catalog reveals distributions of vortex sizes, aspect ratios, and locations on the planet. For example, your work showed that white and dark vortices are preferentially found near the poles. These distributions help researchers derive general parameters about Jupiter’s atmosphere that can give us insights about its internal processes and the atmospheres of other planets.
      Over 5,000 of you helped build this catalog by performing over a million classifications of images of Jupiter from the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno mission. The details of the catalog are now published in this paper in the Planetary Science Journal. You can also learn more about this amazing volunteer effort in a video you can find on the Jovian Vortex Hunter Results webpage.Thanks to your efforts, The Jovian Vortex Hunter project is out of data. But you can work with JunoCam data in a different way by participating in NASA’s JunoCam citizen science project.
      A set of really cool vortices–spinning storms–found by Jovian Vortex Hunters. Data from the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno mission.
      Facebook logo @DoNASAScience @DoNASAScience Share








      Details
      Last Updated Dec 17, 2024 Editor Bill Keeter Related Terms
      Citizen Science Planetary Science Division View the full article
    • By European Space Agency
      Video: 00:11:10 In 2024, ESA continued to drive Europe’s innovation and excellence in space, equipping the continent with advanced tools and knowledge to address global and local challenges. The year saw pioneering missions, cutting-edge satellites and the pivotal restoration of Europe’s independent access to space. 
      The first Ariane 6 launch was perhaps ‘the’ highlight of the year but it was only one of many achievements. We saw the last Vega launch and then the return to flight of Vega-C, the more powerful, upgraded version carrying Sentinel-1C.
      Far away in our Solar System, the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft performed twoMercury flybys in 2024, needed so that it can enter orbit around Mercury in 2026. Juice also performed a crucial gravity assist, this time becoming the first spacecraft to conduct a Moon-Earth double flyby on its way to Jupiter. 
      Twenty years after ESA’s Rosetta was launched and 10 years since its historic arrival at the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, we launched another spacecraft to a small body, the Hera planetary defence mission to investigate asteroid Dimorphos.
      2024 was an important year for Europe’s Galileo constellation which continued to expand with the launch of four new satellites and an updated Galileo ground system. The year also saw the launch of ESA’s Proba-3 mission: two precision formation-flying satellites forming a solar coronagraph to study the Sun’s faint corona. 
      In human spaceflight, Europe continues to contribute to science from the ISS as Andreas Mogensen’s Huginn mission continued into 2024. Andreas even met up in space with ESA project astronaut Marcus Wandt who was launched on his Muninn mission, making it the first time two Scandinavians were in space together. 
      Meanwhile the latest class of ESA astronauts completed basic training and graduated in April. Two of them, Sophie and Raphaël, were then assigned to long-duration missions to the ISS in 2026.
      We made crucial steps for Europe in gaining access to the Moon: the inauguration of our LUNA facility with DLR, and the delivery of a third European Service Module for NASA’s Orion spacecraft as part of the Artemis programme.
      Europe is also contributing to the international Lunar Gateway and developing and ESA lunar lander called Argonaut. These landers will rely on ESA Moonlight, the programme to establish Europe’s first dedicated satellite constellation for lunar communication and navigation.
      As 2024 draws to a close, ESA’s achievements this year have reinforced Europe’s role in space. ESA’s journey continues to explore new frontiers, shaping the space landscape for generations to come.
      View the full article
    • By USH
      Since late November 2024 there is something is going on and no one has the answer to why there are ongoing incursions of unidentified drones over U.S. and U.K. military bases, nuclear installations and areas such as New Jersey and Manchester Airport.

      For example, over the past 72 hours, again there have been numerous reports of large, car-sized drones or UFOs seen in the US (New Jersey, Arizona, North Carolina, Texas) and the UK too. 

      These drones often flying in formations displaying advanced capabilities such as coordination, range, endurance, and the ability to evade detection and interception. Despite multiple sightings, none have been recovered or identified, and no physical descriptions or origins have been confirmed. 
      Key details: 
      Activity: The drones have penetrated restricted airspace repeatedly, often in swarms of a dozen or more. 
      Capabilities: The drones exhibit advanced coordination and endurance, suggesting sophisticated technology.  
      Response: The U.S. Air Force acknowledges the incursions but states that they have not disrupted operations. Investigations are ongoing in collaboration with U.K. authorities. 
      Speculation: Potential origins range from Russia or China to commercial or recreational sources. However, their behavior and capabilities seem to exceed typical drone technology. Even there is speculation about an upcoming false flag alien/UFO invasion.
      Government Inaction: Criticism is directed at the Pentagon and other authorities for not addressing the issue or taking action to remove the objects, especially given their proximity to critical infrastructure. 
      The FBI and other authorities are reportedly focused on potential UFO or drone activities, particularly on or around December 3rd, which some claim was predicted to be significant by an individual known for accurately forecasting the 2003 Indonesian tsunami. 
      Media Suppression: Reports indicate that some footage and discussions about the sightings have been censored or removed. 
      Historical Context: The events resemble past UFO sightings at military installations, such as the 1975 U.S. military base incursions, where objects displayed extraordinary flight capabilities and eluded interception. 
      The situation remains unresolved, raising questions about the drones' origins, purpose, and implications for military security. 
      Whether they are advanced foreign drones or something more extraordinary, the lack of evidence and official explanations fuels speculation whether these sightings represent a security threat. 
      More information is awaited from ongoing investigations and official responses. 

      Several links/discussions of reported drone/UFO sightings: 
      Manchester Airport UFO sighting from inside the cockpit plus Clear shot of Airport UAP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zkZ3x1T0QU 
      Drones? UFOs? What's flying over the UK Bases? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy4feLBNQq8 
      UFO Invasion?! "They're the size of cars spotted over New Jersey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBLa6lUi5fg 
      Drone/ UFO sighting over the Duke Nuclear Power Plant https://x.com/digijordan/status/1862721088544772434View the full article
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