Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
MRO HiRISE image reveals remnants of an ancient city on Mars destroyed by thermonuclear attack
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
Illustration of the main asteroid belt, orbiting the Sun between Mars and JupiterNASA NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope includes asteroids on its list of objects studied and secrets revealed.
A team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge repurposed Webb’s observations of a distant star to reveal a population of small asteroids — smaller than astronomers had ever detected orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The 138 new asteroids range from the size of a bus to the size of a stadium — a size range in the main belt that has not been observable with ground-based telescopes. Knowing how many main belt asteroids are in different size ranges can tell us something about how asteroids have been changed over time by collisions. That process is related to how some of them have escaped the main belt over the solar system’s history, and even how meteorites end up on Earth.
“We now understand more about how small objects in the asteroid belt are formed and how many there could be,” said Tom Greene, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and co-author on the paper presenting the results. “Asteroids this size likely formed from collisions between larger ones in the main belt and are likely to drift towards the vicinity of Earth and the Sun.”
Insights from this research could inform the work of the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project at Ames. ATAP works across disciplines to support NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office by studying what would happen in the case of an Earth impact and modeling the associated risks.
“It’s exciting that Webb’s capabilities can be used to glean insights into asteroids,” said Jessie Dotson, an astrophysicist at Ames and member of ATAP. “Understanding the sizes, numbers, and evolutionary history of smaller main belt asteroids provides important background about the near-Earth asteroids we study for planetary defense.”
Illustration of the James Webb Space TelescopeNASA The team that made the asteroid detections, led by research scientist Artem Burdanov and professor of planetary science Julien de Wit, both of MIT, developed a method to analyze existing Webb images for the presence of asteroids that may have been inadvertently “caught on film” as they passed in front of the telescope. Using the new image processing technique, they studied more than 10,000 images of the star TRAPPIST-1, originally taken to search for atmospheres around planets orbiting the star, in the search for life beyond Earth.
Asteroids shine more brightly in infrared light, the wavelength Webb is tuned to detect, than in visible light, helping reveal the population of main belt asteroids that had gone unnoticed until now. NASA will also take advantage of that infrared glow with an upcoming mission, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor. NEO Surveyor is the first space telescope specifically designed to hunt for near-Earth asteroids and comets that may be potential hazards to Earth.
The paper presenting this research, “Detections of decameter main-belt asteroids with JWST,” was published Dec. 9 in Nature.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
For news media:
Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the NASA Ames newsroom.
View the full article
-
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
Share
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
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By European Space Agency
Video: 00:01:22 An ethereal dance of misty clouds of interstellar dust with a myriad of distant stars and galaxies speckled like paint drops over a black canvas. This is a sonification of a breathtaking image king image taken by ESA's Euclid space telescope of the young star-forming region Messier 78.
The sonification offers a different representation of the data collected by Euclid, and lets us explore the stellar nurseries in M78 through sound. Close your eyes and listen to let the cosmic image be drawn by your mind’s eye, or watch as the traceback line in this video follows the sounds to colour the image from left to right.
The twinkling sounds of various pitches and volumes represent the galaxies and stars in the frame. The pitch of the sound points towards where we see the dot of light in the image. Higher pitches tell us that a star or galaxy appears further at the top in the image along the traceback line.
The brightness of these objects in and around M78 are represented by the volume of the twinkles. Whenever we hear a particularly loud clink, the star or galaxy that Euclid observed appears particularly bright in the image.
Underlying these jingling sounds, we can hear a steady undertone, made up of two chords which represent different regions in Messier 78. This sound intensifies as the traceback line approaches first the brightest, and later the densest regions in the nebula.
The first two deeper crescendos in this undertone indicate two patches in the image where the most intense colour is blue/purple. These appear as two ‘cavities’ in M78, where newly forming stars carve out and illuminate the dust and gas in which they were born.
The chords intensify a third time at a slightly higher pitch corresponding to the red-orange colours in the image, as the sound draws over the densest star-forming region of the frame. This stellar nursery is hidden by a layer of dust and gas that is so thick that it obscures almost all the light of the young stars within it.
As the sound traces over the entire Euclid image, these different tones together form a cosmic symphony that represents the image of Messier 78, and the stars and galaxies that lie behind and within it. You can read more about this image that was first revealed to the eyes of the world earlier this year here.
Many thanks to Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space / Maple Pools) for making the sonification in this video. If you would like to hear more sonifications and music by this artist, please visit: https://linktr.ee/maplepools
View the full article
-
By NASA
4 min read
NASA Open Science Reveals Sounds of Space
A composite image of the Crab Nebula features X-rays from Chandra (blue and white), optical data from Hubble (purple), and infrared data from Spitzer (pink). This image is one of several that can be experienced as a sonification through Chandra’s Universe of Sound project. X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI; Infrared: NASA-JPL-Caltech NASA has a long history of translating astronomy data into beautiful images that are beloved by the public. Through its Chandra X-ray Observatory and Universe of Learning programs, NASA brings that principle into the world of audio in a project known as “A Universe of Sound.” The team has converted openly available data from Chandra, supplemented by open data from other observatories, into dozens of “sonifications,” with more on the way.
Following the open science principle of accessibility, “A Universe of Sound” helps members of the public who are blind or low vision experience NASA data in a new sensory way. Sighted users also enjoy listening to the sonifications.
“Open science is this way to not just have data archives that are accessible and incredibly rich, but also to enhance the data outputs themselves,” said Dr. Kimberly Arcand, the visualization scientist and emerging technology lead at Chandra and member of NASA’s Universe of Learning who heads up the sonification team. “I want everybody to have the same type of access to this data that I do as a scientist. Sonification is just one of those steps.”
Data sonification of the Milky Way galactic center, made using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope. While the Chandra telescope provides data in X-ray wavelengths for most of the sonifications, the team also took open data from other observatories to create a fuller picture of the universe. Types of data used to create some of the sonifications include visual and ultraviolet light from the Hubble Space Telescope, infrared and visual light from the James Webb Space Telescope, and infrared light from the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope.
The sonification team, which includes astrophysicist Matt Russo, musician Andrew Santaguida (both of the SYSTEM Sounds project), consultant Christine Malec, and Dr. Arcand, assigned each wavelength of observation to a different musical instrument or synthesized sound to create a symphony of data. Making the separate layers publicly available was important to the team to help listeners understand the data better.
“It’s not just about accessibility. It’s also about reproducibility,” Arcand said. “We’re being very specific with providing all of the layers of sound, and then describing what those layers are doing to make it more transparent and obvious which steps were taken and what process of translation has occurred.”
For example, in a sonification of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, modified piano sounds represent X-ray data from Chandra, strings and brass represent infrared data from Webb and Spitzer, and small cymbals represent stars located via visual light data from Hubble.
Data sonification of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant, made using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope, and Hubble Space Telescope. The team brought together people of various backgrounds to make the project a success – scientists to obtain and interpret the data, audio engineers to mix the sonifications, and members of the blind and low vision community to direct the product into something that brought a greater understanding of the data.
“Another benefit to open science is it tends to open those pathways of collaboration,” Arcand said. “We invite lots of different community members into the process to make sure we’re creating something that adds value, that adds to the greater good, and that makes the investment in the data worthwhile.”
A documentary about the sonifications called “Listen to the Universe” is hosted on NASA+. Visitors can listen to all the team’s sonifications, including the separate layers from each wavelength of observation, on the Universe of Sound website.
By Lauren Leese
Web Content Strategist for the Office of the Chief Science Data Officer
Share
Details
Last Updated Dec 17, 2024 Related Terms
Chandra X-Ray Observatory Galaxies Open Science Stars Explore More
7 min read NASA’s Webb Finds Planet-Forming Disks Lived Longer in Early Universe
Article
2 days ago
2 min read Hubble Images a Grand Spiral
Article
5 days ago
6 min read Found: First Actively Forming Galaxy as Lightweight as Young Milky Way
Article
1 week ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By European Space Agency
Step into the holidays with this picturesque ‘winter wonderland’ scene at the south pole of Mars, captured by ESA’s Mars Express.
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.