“I’m only a four-dimensional creature. Haven’t got a clue how to visualise infinity. Even Einstein hadn’t. I know because I asked him.” — Sir Patrick Moore
The Sky at Night: Curiosity at Mars (Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott):
Patrick Moore interviews Carl Sagan (h/t @megschwamb):
BBC News: Sir Patrick Moore: Chris Lintott’s tribute
Discovery News: Astronomer Patrick Moore Dies at 89
UPDATE 2: So it turns out that Curiosity does have data to suggest that organics and perchlorates may be present in the Mars soil. As NASA keeps reminding us, this is not “proof” of organics, it’s “promising data.” Regardless, the media has made up their own mind as to what it means. As for Voyager 1, my speculation that it has left the solar system wasn’t quite correct… close, but she hasn’t left the heliosphere, yet.
UPDATE 1: That whole thing I said in my Al Jazeera English op-ed about being blinkered on the organics explanation for the “big” news on Monday? Well, case in point, as tweeted by @MarsToday on Sunday night, perhaps Curiosity has discovered further evidence for perchlorates on Mars. I have no clue where this information is sourced, and I’m not going to speculate any more, but if perchlorates have been discovered in Gale Crater, it would support the findings of NASA’s 2008 Mars Phoenix lander findings of perchlorate and possible liquid water brine in the arctic regions of the Red Planet. Place your bets…
Over the last bizarre few days, a key NASA scientist (almost) spilled the beans on a “historic” discovery by the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity. Then, speculation ran wild. Had NASA’s newest Mars surface mission discovered organics? Feeling the need to stamp out the glowing embers of organic excitement ahead of the Dec. 3 AGU press conference, NASA said that there would be no big announcement on Monday. But then the agency went even further, issuing a terse statement to point out that the speculation is wrong. “At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics,” said NASA.
So now we’re left, understandably, wondering what lead MSL scientist John Grotzinger was referring to. I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t misquoted by the NPR journalist who happened to be sitting in his office when the MSL team was receiving data from the mission’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. And if we take NASA’s damage-controlling statements at face value, Grotzinger was just getting excited for all the data being received from the rover — after all, the entire mission is historic.
As a science media guy with a background in science, I totally ‘get’ what the MSL team are going through. Scientists are only human and whether or not Grotzinger was getting excited for a specific “historic” find or just getting generally excited for all the “historic” data streaming from the rover, is irrelevant. Perhaps he should have been more careful as to the language he used when having an NPR reporter sitting in the same room as him, but that’s academic, I’m pretty sure that if I was leading the most awesome Mars mission in the history of Mars missions I’d be brimming over with excitement too. The scientific process is long and can often seem labored and secretive to the media and public — rumors or a few slipped words from scientists is often all that’s needed to spawn the hype. But for the scientific process to see its course, data needs to be analyzed, re-analyzed and theories need to be formulated. In an announcement as important as “organics on Mars,” the science needs to be watertight.
However, I can’t help but feel that, in NASA’s enthusiasm to “keep the lid” on speculation, that they are setting themselves up for a backlash on Monday.
If the AGU press conference is just “an update about first use of the rover’s full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil,” as the NASA statement says, won’t there be any mention of organics? Will this be a similar announcement to the sampling of Mars air in the search for methane? The upshot of that Nov. 2 press conference was that the Mars air had been tested by SAM and no methane (within experimental limits) had been discovered… yet. But this was a sideline to the announcement of some incredible science as to the evolution of the Martian atmosphere.
This time, although there may not be “definitive,” absolute, watertight proof of organics, might mission scientists announce the detection of something that appears to be organics… “but more work is needed”? It’s a Catch 22: It’s not the “historic” news as the experiment is ongoing pending a rock-solid conclusion; yet it IS “historic” as the mere hint of a detection would bolster the organics experiments of the Viking landers in the 1970s and could hint at the discovery of another piece of the “Mars life puzzle.” And besides, everything Curiosity does is “historic.”
In NASA’s haste to damper speculation, have they cornered themselves into not making any big announcements on Monday? Or have they only added to the speculation, bolstering the media’s attention? Besides, I get the feeling that the media will see any announcement as a “big” announcement regardless of NASA scientists’ intent. Either way, it’s a shame that the hype may distract from the incredible science the MSL team are carrying out every single day.
For more on “Organicsgate,” read my Al Jazeera English op-ed “Mars organics speculation butts heads with scientific process.”
Meanwhile, in deep space, a little probe launched 35 years ago is edging into the interstellar medium and NASA’s Voyager Program team are also holding an AGU press conference on Monday. Although there have been no NPR journalists getting the scoop from mission scientists, it’s worth keeping in mind that Voyager 1 really is about to make history. In October, I reported that the particle detectors aboard the aging spacecraft detected something weird in the outermost reaches of the Solar System. As Voyager 1 ventures deep into the heliosheith — the outermost component of the heliosphere (the Sun’s sphere of influence) — it detected inexplicable high-energy particles. The theory is that these particles are being accelerated by the magnetic mess that is the outermost reaches of the Solar System. But there is growing evidence in particle detections and magnetometer readings that the probe may have just left the Solar System, completely escaping the heliosphere.
A big hint is in the following graphs of data streaming from Voyager 1. The first plot shows the increase in high-energy cosmic ray particle counts. These high-energy particles typically originate from beyond the heliosphere. The bottom plot shows lower-energy particles that originate from the solar wind. Note how the lower-energy particle counts fell off a cliff this summer, and how the high-energy particles have seen a marked increase at around the same period:
So, in light of the media-centric Curiosity debate over what is “historic” and what’s not “historic” enough to be announced at conferences, I’m getting increasingly excited for what the Voyager team have got to say tomorrow. It’s inevitable that Voyager 1 will leave the Solar System, but will NASA call it at the AGU? Who knows, but that would be historic, just without the hype.
Now THAT’s how you land a rover!
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory “Curiosity” has landed inside Gale Crater in a damn-near perfect entry, descent and landing (EDL). What’s more, the first photos from the Martian surface were also received only minutes after confirmation of touchdown, depicting a wonderfully smooth plain littered with small rocks.
The first low resolution photo from Curiosity’s hazcam showed a horizon plus one of the rover’s wheels. And then a higher-resolution hazcam view streamed in. Then another — this time showing the shadow of the one-ton rover — an image that will likely become iconic for tonight’s entire EDL. The concerns about the ability of NASA’s orbiting satellite Mars Odyssey to relay signals from Curiosity rapidly evaporated.
Curiosity had landed and it was already taking my breath away.
After a long night in the “Media Overflow” trailer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I felt overwhelmed with emotion. On the one hand, I was blown away by ingenuity of mankind — the fact we can launch such ambitious missions to other worlds is a testament to exploration and science in its purest form. But I was also overwhelmed by the spirit of JPL’s scientists and engineers who made this happen. I was humbled to be a member of the media covering the event from mission control. It was an experience I’ll never forget.
Tonight is a night to forget politics, this is a night to celebrate NASA and the incredible things they do.
I’ll post more soon, including photos from the event, but for now I need sleep.
What a night.
Since I started working as Space Producer at Discovery News in 2009, there’s always been a major project humming in the background. But on Saturday, that hum evolved into a monster roar when astronaut legend Neil Armstrong spoke at Lowell Observatory, near Flagstaff, Ariz., to introduce the $53 million 4.3-meter Discovery Channel Telescope. Seeing photographs of the ‘scope and its “first light” observations gave me goosebumps.
But this is only the beginning. As the fifth largest optical telescope in the continental USA, the DCT has a packed science schedule and I am in a very privileged position to report on the exciting discoveries that will be made by “our” telescope.
Congratulations to everyone at Lowell Observatory on a job well done!
More:
BIG PICS: The DCT First Light Gallery.
PHOTOS: Get a behind-the-scenes tour of the Discovery Channel Telescope.
INTERVIEW: Unlocking dwarf galaxy mysteries with the DCT — Discovery News talks with Lowell Observatory astronomer Deidre Hunter.
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING:
Cosmic Log — Alan Boyle — Telescope opens a brand new window on Discovery
Bad Astronomy — Phil Plait — Discovery Channel telescope sees first light!
Yes, the Higgs boson has been discovered… or, to put it more accurately, something that looks like a Higgs boson has been discovered. But is it a Higgs boson? There’s a very high probability that it is, but in the world where theory meets high-energy physics, it pays to be completely sure about what you’re looking at.
But for the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, who held a rapturous conference at CERN and in Australia this morning, they’re pretty damned sure they are looking at a bona fide Higgs boson discovery.
“We have observed a new boson,” said CMS lead scientist Joe Incandela.
“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV,” confirmed ATLAS lead scientist Fabiola Gianotti.
“I think we have it,” said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer. “We have discovered a particle that is consistent with a Higgs boson.”
Why all the certainty? Well, it all comes down to statistics, and all the statistics seem to show a defined “bump” in the CMS and ATLAS data around the mass-energy of 125-126 GeV/c2 — to a statistical certainty of 4.9 and 5 sigma. 125-126 GeV/c2 just so happens to be one of the theorized masses of a Higgs boson — placing the Higgs’ mass at 133 times that of a proton. This particular boson is therefore the most massive boson ever detected.
For more news on this incredible discovery, check out my Discovery News blog “Particle ‘Consistent’ With Higgs Boson Discovered“
This morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic field filled with cool plasma forming a dark ribbon across the face of the sun (a feature known as a “filament”) erupted at the exact same time.
It seems very likely that both events were connected after a powerful shock wave produced by the flare destabilized the filament, causing the eruption.
A second solar observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), then spotted a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) blast into space, straight in the direction of Earth. Solar physicists have calculated that this magnetic bubble filled with energetic particles should hit Earth on August 3, so look out for some intense aurorae, a solar storm is on its way…
For more on this impressive solar eruption, read my Discovery News article, “Incoming! The Sun Unleashes CME at Earth“
For this special little planet, today has been a very big day.
Although we’ve speculated that planets the size of Earth must exist elsewhere in the cosmos, it wasn’t until one of the co-investigators working with the Kepler Space Telescope said he had statistical evidence that worlds of the approximate size of Earth appear to dominate our Milky Way.
We now know Earth isn’t unique.
Alas, this historic news didn’t come without controversy. It was unofficially broken at a TED conference in Oxford earlier this month and only after a recording of a presentation given by Dimitar Sasselov was posted online did the news get out. What’s more, the announcement only became clear when Sasselov referred to a presentation slide depicting a bar chart with the different sizes of exoplanets discovered by Kepler:
This slide shows the number of exoplanets discovered up until this month, binned by size. We have Jupiter-like exoplanets, Saturn-like exoplanets and Neptune-like exoplanets, all compared with Earth’s radius.
The heart-stopping moment comes when looking at the bar that represents Earth-like exoplanets (i.e. worlds with a radius of below 2 Earth radii, or “<2 Re"). According to Sasselov, Kepler has detected a lot of Earth-like worlds, so many in fact that they dominate the picture. From what we have here, it would appear that around 140 exoplanets are considered to be like Earth.
“The statistical result is loud and clear,” said Sasselov. “And the statistical result is that planets like our own Earth are out there. Our Milky Way galaxy is rich in these kinds of planets.”
But why the controversy? Isn’t this good news?
It would appear that the Kepler co-investigator chose not to wait until the official press release from NASA. He publicized these groundbreaking results in the U.K. at an event where you had to buy tickets to attend. This isn’t usually the stage you’d expect this kind of discovery to be announced — a move that will undoubtedly upset many.
“What is really annoying is that the Kepler folks were complaining about releasing information since they wanted more time to analyze it before making any announcements,” Keith Cowing, of NASAWatch.com, wrote in a SpaceRef article today. “And then the project’s Co-I goes off and spills the beans before an exclusive audience – offshore. We only find out about it when the video gets quietly posted weeks later.”
This sentiment is understandable. Only last month there was some frustration vented at the Kepler team for holding back data on 400 exoplanet candidates. While this might be standard practice — the discovering team should be allowed some time to publish work on any discoveries they have uncovered — telling the world’s scientists they will have to wait until February 2011 before they can get their hands on this invaluable data was a bridge too far.
In light of this, for a Kepler scientist to then jump the gun and disclose a groundbreaking discovery at an international conference without the backing of an official NASA release seems a little hypocritical.
But there is another argument to put out there: Why should anyone sit on such a profound discovery? Perhaps NASA and the Kepler team should have issued an earlier press release announcing to the world that 140 candidate Earth-like worlds have been detected and that further work will need to be done to confirm.
Ultimately, this controversy is just background noise when compared to what we have learned today. Official confirmation or not, Dimitar Sasselov’s message is clear. Although these detections need to be confirmed (hence why these worlds are referred to as “candidates”), it would appear there is an overwhelming preponderance of exoplanets measuring 2 Earth radii or less.
For me, that fact alone is astonishing — the first scientific evidence that worlds of Earth dimensions are not rare.
Earth is no longer unique.
For more, read my Discovery News article, “Kepler Scientist: ‘Galaxy is Rich in Earth-Like Planets‘”
Quite frankly, I’m stunned.
An Australian amateur astronomer has just observed his second ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ event: an impact in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Phil Plait was very quick to get the news out, describing it as a “major coincidence,” and he ain’t wrong!
Anthony Wesley’s first event was the famous July 2009 observation of what was thought to have been the immediate aftermath of a comet impact in the Jovian atmosphere. His second happened on Thursday at 20:31 UTC when he was observing Jupiter when something hit the atmosphere, generating a huge fireball.
It is not known whether this event was caused by a comet or asteroid, but in a bizarre case of serendipity, earlier on Thursday Hubble released more information on his original impact event. The July 2009 “bruise” in the gas giant’s atmosphere is now thought to have been caused by an asteroid, and not a comet.
The Hubble press release included details on how researchers deduced that it was actually more likely that a 500 meter-wide asteroid hit Jupiter in 2009. One clue was that newly installed cameras on the space telescope detected little dust in the halo surrounding the impact site — a characteristic that was detected after the impact of the shards of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994. Also, the calculated trajectory of the 2009 event indicated the object didn’t have an orbit commonly associated with comets. If the 2009 event was an asteroid, that means Wesley saw something never seen before: the site of a recent asteroid impact on a celestial body.
And now, less than a year after being the first to see that impact aftermath, Wesley has done it again. Another amateur astronomer, Christopher Go, was quick to confirm Thursday’s fireball with a video of the 2 second flash in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.
These impact events serve as a reminder about Jupiter’s fortuitous role in our Solar System. As the gas giant is so massive, its gravitational pull has a huge influence over the outer planets, dwarf planets, comets and asteroids. Acting like an interplanetary ‘vacuum cleaner’ Jupiter can block potentially disastrous chunks of stuff from taking a dive into the inner Solar System. It is thought that this distant planet has helped Earth become the thriving world it is today, preventing many asteroids and comets from ruining our evolution.
Thank you Jupiter!
Something rather bizarre was observed in the asteroid belt on January 6. Ray Villard at Discovery News has just posted an exciting article about the discovery of a comet… but it’s not your average, run-of-the-mill kinda comet. This comet appears to orbit the Sun, embedded in the asteroid belt.
Comets don’t usually do that, they tend to have elliptical and inclined orbits, orbits that carry them close to the Sun (when they start to heat up, creating an attractive cometary tail as volatile ices sublimate into space, producing a dusty vapor). They are then flung back out into the furthest reaches of the Solar System where the heating stops and the comet tail disappears until the next solar approach.
But P/2010 A2 — discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey — has a circular orbit and it still appears to be venting something into space.
There is the possibility that it is a member of a very exclusive bunch of objects known as main belt comets (MBCs). MBCs are confused asteroid/comet hybrids that appear to spontaneously vent vapor and dust into space and yet stay confined to the asteroid belt. But, if P/2010 A2 is confirmed to be one of these, it will only be the fifth such object to be discovered.
So what else could it be? If the potential discovery of an MBC doesn’t excite you enough, it could be something else entirely: the dust produced by a hyper-velocity impact between two asteroids. If this is the case, it would be the first ever observation of an asteroid impact in the Solar System.
The asteroid belt isn’t the same asteroid belt you might see in science fiction; although there are countless rocky bodies in our asteroid belt, it is rare that these rocky bodies encounter each other. Space is very big, and although the density of asteroids in this region might be considered to be “high”, this is space we’re talking about, you can fly a spaceship through the region without having to worry that you’ll bump into something. The average distance between asteroids is huge, making it a very rare occurrence any two should hit. But given enough asteroids, and enough time, eventually asteroid collisions do happen. And in the case of P/2010 A2, we might have been lucky.
The chatter between comet/asteroid experts is increasing, and on one message board posting, Javier Licandro (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain) reports observing a secondary asteroid traveling with the cloud-like P/2010 A2.
“The asteroid moves in the same direction and at the same rate as the comet,” reports Licandro on The Minor Planet Mailing List. “In addition, the P/2010 A2 (LINEAR) image does not show any central condensation and looks like a ‘dust swarm’.”
“A short lived event, such as a collision, may have produced the observed dust ejecta.”
Therefore, this ‘comet’ may actually be the debris that was ejected after a collision between two asteroids. Although these are preliminary findings and it’s going to take some serious observing time to understand the true nature of P/2010 A2, it’s exciting to think that we may just have observed an incredibly rare event, 250 million miles away.
Source: Discovery News
The first results from NASA’s Kepler exoplanet hunter are in and a perplexing early result has been announced. Yes, the space telescope is working fine, and no, it hasn’t spotted an alien homeworld (yet), but the Kepler team have uncovered something pretty cool.
Kepler may have discovered a new class of celestial object (possibly).
But before we start scratching our heads in confusion or popping the champagne corks in celebration, let’s try to work out what Kepler has observed.
Kepler is currently monitoring 100,000 stars in an effort to seek out extra-solar planets (or “exoplanets”) orbiting these stars. Although Kepler was only launched in March 2009 and early doubts about the observatory’s capabilities caused some low-level concern, Kepler appears to be functioning well and mission controllers are already reporting early results.
Five new exoplanet discoveries by Kepler were announced at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Washington D.C. on January 4th, and all seem to have very strange characteristics. Fortunately Discovery News blogger Ray Villard was on the scene at the AAS to hear what the Kepler team had to announce:
In sifting through the Kepler data taken so far, postdoctoral student Jason Rowe found a very curious light signature. When an object passed behind its central star, the light from the system dropped significantly. This means the object — called KOI 74b — must be glowing fiercely with its own light that was blocked out when the object was eclipsed.
Hold up, the light dimmed when the exoplanet passed behind its parent star? Something’s not right here. Kepler detects exoplanets when the worlds pass in front of their parent stars, thereby dimming the starlight, not vice versa!
Actually, this is exactly what’s happened. The “exoplanets” orbiting two otherwise ordinary stars appear to be brighter — and hotter — than their host stars. It’s as if the roles of the stars and the exoplanets have been reversed; the stars are dimming the exoplanetary light as the exoplanet passes behind the star.
Needless to say, there is currently no stellar model that predicts this kind of behavior from extra-solar planetary systems.
This means the object — called KOI 74b — must be glowing fiercely with its own light that was blocked out when the object was eclipsed […] It is seething at 70,000 degrees Fahrenheit while the parent star is 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The strange object can’t be a star because the transit data show that it is no bigger than Jupiter. —Ray Villard, Discovery News.
One theory is that KOI 74b (and the other strange object, KOI 81b) could be a white dwarf star that migrated close to its stellar partner. Through binary interactions, the white dwarf was stripped of some of its mass, causing it to puff up and appear like a gas giant exoplanet. That would certainly go to some way of explaining why these two “exoplanets” are so hot.
Of course, the other option is that Kepler has made a groundbreaking discovery and identified a whole new class of celestial object… but I suspect there are other, more mundane reasons for these observations.
I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see until followup observations are made…
Source: Discovery News
astroengine.com 