Daily Archives: December 29, 2021

Space science next year will be rocketed forward with missions to the Moon, asteroids, Mars and the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope coming online.

Why it matters: The data sent back to Earth from these upcoming missions will help scientists learn more than ever before about objects in the solar system and far beyond it.

What's happening: Space agencies like NASA, the European Space Agency and Japan's space agency, JAXA, are all aiming to send probes to various targets around the solar system this year. They include:

Mars: The European Space Agency and Russia are planning to launch their joint ExoMars lander and rover to the surface of the Red Planet in September.

Asteroids: NASA's Psyche mission is due to launch in August 2022 on a mission to explore a strange, metal-dominated asteroid that may have once been part of the core of a long-dead planet.

The Moon: NASA is expected to launch the first flight of its Space Launch System mega-rocket on a trip around the Moon, and the space agency plans to load it with scientific experiments.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope the successor to the Hubble is also expected to be up and running starting early in 2022.

Between the lines: As all of these missions launch and arrive at their targets, astronomers and planetary scientists will also be shoring up their goals for the coming years.

What to watch: China is expected to continue collecting data from ongoing robotic missions to the Moon and Mars.

Read this article:

Moon, Mars and asteroid missions top 2022 space goals - Axios

Elon Musk said SpaceX will land humans on Mars with its Starship rocket in 10 years' time, in the worst-case scenario.

During an episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast released on Tuesday, Fridman asked Musk when he thinks SpaceX will land human beings on the Red Planet.

After a 20-second pause, the billionaire replied: "Best case is about five years, worst case 10 years."

Musk told Fridman that the determining factors included "engineering the vehicle," adding that "Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made."

"The fundamental optimization of Starship is minimizing the cost per ton to orbit and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars," Musk told Fridman on the podcast.

Currently, nobody can fly to Mars for one trillion dollars, Musk told Fridman. "No amount of money can get you a ticket to Mars," he said on the podcast.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO has forecasted various dates for his company reaching and landing on the Red Planet.

Musk said in an interview on the audio app Clubhouse in February that it will take "five and a half years" before a crewed mission of SpaceX's Starship rocket could land on the Red Planet.

Musk tweeted in March that his aerospace company would land its Starship rockets on Mars "well before" 2030.

Experts previously told Insider that it could take longer than he's predicting if things don't go exactly to plan during the three remaining launch opportunities before 2026.

Musk eventually plans to build1,000 Starship rockets and launch three of them a day to fly one million people to the Red Planet.

Continue reading here:

Elon Musk: SpaceX will land humans on Mars worst case in 10 years - Business Insider

The bright white region of this image shows the icy cap that covers Mars south pole, composed of frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide. ESAs Mars Express imaged this area of Mars on December 17, 2012, in infrared, green and blue light, using its High Resolution Stereo Camera. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Bill Dunford

Is there water on Mars? There sure is! Its not exactly like water on Earth but Martian H20 can tell us a lot about the planets distant past while potentially aiding explorers in the future. Some of the water is even trapped inside rocks! Hear from Mars scientist Eva Scheller who helped make that discovery using NASA data.

The short answer is yes. Now, we have to think about, how do we actually define water? Its not quite like on Earth, but its definitely there. Water is a molecule that has one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. The ice on Mars is a little bit different than on Earth.

On Earth, usually the ice is just, you know, water ice. But on Mars, its actually water ice and CO2 ice mixed with each other. On Mars, its just so cold that it gets frozen, so you actually have those mixed together both at the poles and underneath the surface as well. We even have water in the atmosphere as a water vapor. Its a very small amount, but its there.

We also have water inside of rocks. So, you can think about rocks as sort of a stack of layers and sometimes theres water trapped in between those layers. Weve actually measured this with a lot of the different missions from NASA and thats actually what I study. And the last state of potential state of water is, do we have liquid water on Mars? The answer is we havent really observed it. We do see these dark streaks on some hillsides that we call recurring slope lineae.

One idea is that these slope lineae could be formed by the flow of liquid water. But theres also other ideas where you actually dont need liquid water to explain the formation of these dark streaks. Maybe they could form through sand flow or that kind of thing.

So, is there water on Mars? Not quite like the oceans we know on Earth, but its definitely there.

Visit link:

We Asked a NASA Scientist: Is There Water on Mars? [Video] - SciTechDaily

Look for reddish Mars with the aid of binoculars, if needed. Brighter, red Antares, the heart star of the Scorpion, may be seen with the naked eye at the center of Scorpius. Image courtesy EarthSky.org

December 27, 2021January 9, 2022

MOUNT WASHINGTON A boon for stargazers, the unusually long, dark mornings that follow the winter solstice reward the curious who venture outdoors at dawn. The solstice-time Sun rises at 7:22 a.m. this week through January 9, 2022. Mornings continue dark as afternoons are increasingly brighter: todays sunset is at 4:28 p.m.; sundown on January 9 is 4:39 p.m.

While familiar constellations of the winter season travel the sky at night, the celestial dome at dawn is painted with spring and summer stars, a crescent moon this week and enter planet Mars. Mars rises at 5:24 a.m. tomorrow morning and, climbing higher every day, 5:18 a.m. on January 9. Around the winter solstice, quintessential summer star patterns, Scorpius the Scorpion and the Summer Triangle, rise in the morning sky along the southeast and northeast horizon, respectively. At summer solstice they are in the exact same positions when they rise in the evening sky. Recall where on the skyline the Scorpion and the Triangle rise in June, and we are reminded of balmy summer evenings while stargazing on frosty mornings.

Referring to the diagram above, spring stars are higher in the sky at dawn, having preceded summer. At the top of the sky, the Big Dipper a fragment of its curved handle at the top of the schema points toward orange Arcturus, the second brightest star in northern skies. Arcturus rises in the evening sky on the vernal equinox. Blue Spica and vivid Corvus the Crow are not far behind.

How did Omicron Ophiuchi, 5.12 magnitude, not visible with the naked eye, come to my attention? When working on StarryNight7 software to compose the star chart, a slip of the cursor into the space around Mars brought Omicron into view. Intrigued, I read the description attached to the star, a double star, part of a multiple star system. Although the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is simply named for the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, I had in mind reports that the number of mutations is much higher than weve seen in previous variants. My interest in the multiple aspect led me to discover that in astronomy, Omicron is used to designate the 15th star in a constellation group, prompting more questions.

Turning to the evening sky, the long-lasting presence of brilliant planet Venus at dusk is drawing to a close. By January 10, Venus will set with the Sun, having disappeared from the evening sky days before. To see Venus and Mercury together, look within the hour after sunset in the days before the New Year.

Excerpt from:

EYES TO THE SKY: Mars, Scorpius, Omicron, moon mornings; Mercury joins Venus evenings - theberkshireedge.com

Earth and Mars likely arose from collisions between giant moon-size rocks instead of the clumping together of tiny pebbles over time, a new study found.

Previous research suggested there may be two primary ways in which rocky planets such as Earth are built. The classic model proposes that moon-to-Mars-size rocks dubbed planetary embryos once regularly smashed together in the inner solar system, eventually assembling into full-size worlds. A more recent alternative concept envisions tiny pebbles from the outer solar system drifting inward toward the sun, gradually accumulating to form rocky planets, a process thought essential to the formation of the cores of giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.

To see which model potentially best explains how the solar system's rocky planets formed, scientists analyzed a total of about 0.77 ounces (22 grams) of material from 17 meteorites that originated from Mars. These rocks were blasted off the Red Planet by impacts of ancient asteroids, eventually finding their way to Earth.

Related: How was Earth formed?

The researchers examined how these samples varied in their isotopic composition. Isotopes are forms of the same chemical element that vary only in the number of neutrons in their nucleus. For instance, uranium-234 has 142 neutrons in its core while uranium-238 has146 neutrons.

The scientists compared levels of titanium, zirconium and molybdenum isotopes from Mars and from Earth with those of different groups of meteorites from the inner and outer solar system. They found the Earth and Martian rocks more closely resembled meteorites from the inner solar system, with only about 4% of their compositions resembling outer solar system material. The large number of Martian meteorites they analyzed helped overcome conflicting results seen in prior work that analyzed smaller numbers of these rocks.

All in all, "we resolve conflicting interpretations of previous studies and show that Earth and Mars were formed from material that largely originated in the inner solar system," study lead author Christoph Burkhardt, a planetary scientist at the University of Mnster in Germany, told Space.com. "Only a few percent of the building blocks of these two planets originated beyond Jupiter's orbit. As such, we answer the fundamental question of what the Earth is made of, and this allows [us] to address the even more fundamental question of how Earth formed."

Although pebble accumulation might play a major part in rocky planet formation around other stars, one reason it likely only had a minor role in rocky planet formation in our solar system is Jupiter, which could have devoured much of the pebbles and dust from the outer solar system that normally would have drifted inward toward the sun.

"There is no doubt that Jupiter as the 'king of the planets' had an influence on what was going on in the inner solar system," Burkhardt said. "Without Jupiter, we may sit today on a super-Earth or mini-Neptune planet."

The new findings also suggest that both Earth and Mars likely incorporated material from a group of space rocks that are currently unknown to science, ones originating "most likely sunwards of Earth's orbit," Burkhardt said. "So the hunt is on. Finding a sample with the predicted characteristics among the ungrouped meteorites in our collections would be amazing."

The scientists detailed their findings online Dec. 22 in the journal Science Advances.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Read the original post:

Mars and Earth likely formed from collisions of moon-sized rocks - Space.com

With all of the worrying news emerging from the fields of health and science this year, some of the incredible advances that occurred may have been overlooked. But there have been many weird and wonderful feats in the world of research.

Life-saving tests, treatments and vaccines were developed and rolled-out including those led by Australian doctors and a world-first malaria vaccine for children was endorsed by the World Health Organization. A new species of dinosaur was discovered in south-west Queensland, adding to our understanding about how they evolved. We learned from Nasa that the much-feared asteroid, Apophis, wont hit Earth for at least 100 years, so thats a relief.

Meanwhile, approval was given for the construction of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescopes in Australia and South Africa, with hope that the two largest and most complex networks of radio telescopes, once built, will redefine our understanding of space.

Guardian Australia asked some of the leading experts in a range of fields to share the scientific advances they found most interesting, inspiring, or surprising this year. Among the doom and gloom, there is much progress, innovation and hope to celebrate.

President of the Australian Academy of Science, molecular biologist, and former chairman of CSL Limited

The development and the success of RNA-based vaccines has had enormous global impact during the past year. Theres enormous short-term success but it also opens up a lot of potential long-term opportunities in delivering RNA as a vaccine for emerging diseases and also as a means of developing new therapeutics to treat a whole range of disorders.

To get a new type of vaccine out there requires very big clinical trials because a crucial thing with a vaccine, of course, is safety.

RNA research has been going on for decades. The difficulty in translating that into practical use in the vaccine area has been because weve got lots of great vaccines for other diseases. If youve got great vaccines that work already, its very hard for a new vaccine to enter the market. That was one impediment to the practical development of RNA vaccines, which the pandemic suddenly produced a reason for, [because] we needed something new.

Applied Antarctic ecologist and principal research scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division

Antarctica is a bellwether for climate change impacts, with recent evidence of ecosystem collapse and that a major ice shelf in west Antarctica may fail within the decade.

So for me, this years most exciting advance is not a discovery but solid investment in future Antarctic science, heralded by the arrival of Australias new icebreaker, RSV Nuyina, the most advanced polar research vessel in the world, and the initiation of not one, but three new university-based Antarctic research initiatives.

Medical virologist, Australian representative on the World Health Organizations investigation into the origins of coronavirus, director of public health pathology at NSW Health.

From my point of view, the origins of Sars-CoV-2 has been the big story.

Knowing from where viruses and pandemics start is crucial to understanding the interactions between humans and animals, and how this is influenced by human behaviour, industrialisation, and climate change.

Then once a virus has entered humans, how human actions affect its spread travel, mass gatherings, the medical system, access to health care and other actions. We need this knowledge to prepare for the next pandemic rest assured, there will be another one!

This was then overlaid by the politics, to an extraordinary extent not seen before. Everyone was blaming each other for causing the pandemic, often to cover their own poor pandemic responses. This has led to secretiveness and suspicion, delay and obfuscation, denial and accusation. An investigation into the origins of a disease is core scientific and medical business politics has made this an almost impossible task and has been depressingly anti-science.

It needs to be fixed.

Director of the National Covid-19 Clinical Evidence taskforce, and Associate Professor at Cochrane Australia.

In both my personal and professional roles, its incredibly difficult to look past the incredibly rapid development of effective Covid-19 vaccines in terms of amazing scientific advances over the last couple of years.

But, in my other life Im a wannabe astronaut, and I am completely astonished by Nasas Ingenuity helicopter, which has made 18 successful flights on a whole other planet in 2021!

In a year when Ive barely managed to leave my house, the ability to have helicopter flights on Mars seems even more like science fiction than it normally would.

Professor of ocean and climate dynamics at the University of New South Wales, and co-founder of UNSWs Climate Change Research Centre

I think the most important finding that came out in 2021 is a study relating to ocean conditions around the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), which locks up in total about seven metres of global sea level. Lose the WAIS and hundreds of millions of people worldwide would be displaced. The WAIS is known to be the most vulnerable component of the Antarctic ice sheet system and uncertainty about future melt rates is one of the biggest unanswered questions in polar climate science.

The published ocean measurements were taken adjacent to Thwaites Glacier, which is the most rapidly changing outlet of the WAIS. Using an autonomous underwater vehicle, the study documents the first ever temperature, salinity and oxygen measurements at the Thwaites ice shelf front. The measurements revealed warm water impinging from all sides on what are known as pinning points of the glacier these are critical to ice-shelf stability.

This confirms what scientists have long been concerned about for the Thwaites Glacier; namely that warm water is driving melting at key pinning points. The location of the warm water shows that there is an increased risk of unpinning of the glacier and increased melt of the WAIS.

View original post here:

Choppers on Mars and RNA jabs: the best scientific advances of 2021 - The Guardian

When the first astronauts reach Mars, they will be expected to carry out heavy physical tasks after many months of traveling in weightlessness without the benefits of the exercise machines or the Earthside therapists that help astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) to readapt to gravity. To learn more about how to keep space travelers healthy on such long missions, New Atlas talked to Draper scholars from Harvard and the MIT Health Science and Technology Program, Rachel Bellisle and Tom Abitante, about two new technologies that hold potential for keeping astronauts healthy in zero gravity.

New Atlas: We've long had people in space safely, some of them for well over a year. What's the problem we're facing that needs to be solved here?

Tom Abitante: The main problem is that astronauts lose bone and muscle mass while in space.They can spend time in space safely, but when they come home to Earth after being in space for a year, they're whisked away to physical therapy. When we go to Mars, these astronauts are going to be expected to do physical work when they get there, but muscle and bone loss and the loss of general fitness create a high risk of injury. The current method to prevent this is exercise. However, going to the Moon or Mars, you're not going to be able to carry with you the gear for a large, robust exercise program. We're looking at ways you can get the bone and muscles working that would prevent the loss without lugging massive exercise equipment to Mars?

New Atlas: So the goal is to prevent bone loss and muscle atrophy from occurring?

Rachel Bellisl: More than that, it's the fact that your body is no longer loaded by gravity, which changes so many systems. Bone and muscle are the two great examples, but it can be even more. It's anything that's affected by the physical load that you experience every day.

NASA

New Atlas: Such as?

Tom Abitante: One is the little organs in your inner ears that are always telling you what way is down. In space, there's no down. While that has an initial effect of maybe getting motion sickness, or some spatial disorientation, over long periods of time it can actually affect some kind of your coordination and proprioception, like to your posture and gait. Lots of times when astronauts come back to Earth, it takes them a few days to readjust.

Rachel Bellisle: It can be weeks, depending on the kind of effects we're looking at, to be able to get around and get used to having the forces of gravity on you again.

New Atlas: What are the alternatives to having exercise equipment on long missions to the Moon or Mars?

Rachel Bellisle: We definitely know that the countermeasure protocol is going to look completely different than it does now. There's probably going to be smaller exercise equipment. Our goal is to supplement that. I think there's ways to do that with wearables. Is there a garment that you can wear to add to your conventional protocol every day? I'm studying a skinsuit that reapplies some of that mechanical loading on the body. It's essentially a skin-type garment that squishes the body vertically and reactivates a lot of the load receptors that are usually inactivated in the microgravity environment.

New Atlas: What are these load receptors and what do they do?

Rachel Bellisle: Your body is full of these biological sensors that measure how gravity applies to your body on Earth. There are some in your bones that prompt your bone to maintain strength, and there's some in your muscles, too. Your muscles have to understand how much force they need to apply to walk. When you don't have all of those sensory inputs from gravity, those processes are interrupted. The receptors have to adapt to microgravity, then they have to adapt again to Earth when you get back. This is a big problem for adapting to Mars after a long trip in zero gravity.

NASA

New Atlas: Could you tell us a little about the skinsuit?

Rachel Bellisle: These skinsuits are a passive fabric garment, so there aren't any actuators. It's a little like a soft exoskeleton that's a tight bodysuit. It's a couple sizes too small and calculated perfectly for an individual so that we apply a load on an anchor point on the shoulders, then stretch the fabric and anchor it underneath the feet with straps. We have to make this comfortable to make sure that astronauts want to use these devices.

New Atlas: So how long would you have to wear one of these suits?

Rachel Bellisle: It depends on the application. The European Space Agency actually worked with the skinsuit to prevent some back pain in space and they would have some subjects wear the suit for eight hours. But there are other ideas that it should be worn for an hour or two while exercising.

New Atlas: Tom, you're taking a completely different approach to this. Can you tell us about it?

Tom Abitante: Mine is a little more active. I'm looking at using electrical stimulation, specifically neuromuscular stimulation, to increase the daily action your bones get every day. This is something that they use a lot for spinal cord injury patients. They use electrodes on the muscle that send an electrical pulse through the muscle that will make it contract. This can potentially help reduce bone loss from disuse associated with being in a wheelchair or being in space. The idea is if we do these artificial contractions a couple of hundred times a day, that can keep the bone stimulated enough that these little sensors that Rachel mentioned tell the body to not reduce bone.

Because these are healthy people, there's a major factor that paralyzed patients don't have, and that's discomfort. Paraplegics can't necessarily feel that. That gives you free rein to crank it up and to let it go for longer. With healthy people, there's a limit, because obviously you want them to be able to do work while being electrically stimulated. We need to know how effective it would be and what kind of dosing we would need. We can't wait to go to Mars and see if it works.

New Atlas: It doesn't sound uncomfortable.

Tom Abitante: The idea is to use it at a baseline, but not be super uncomfortable. You definitely feel it, you're definitely aware of it. It's definitely new and different, as both Rachel and I can attest. Fortunately, there is a diminishing effect like when you hear a random white noise and your mind kind of shuts it off. That's where my research kind of comes in. What levels can people take? How many doses? How many would you need a day to replicate your normal exercise activity?

NASA

New Atlas: What's the next step with this? Are you hoping to test it in space at some point?

Rachel Bellisle: Firstly, the skinsuit has quite a heritage. It flew with the European Space Agency on the International Space Station from 2016 to 2017. Now, we've restarted some work at MIT as well to explore it further in different applications and create the new version of the suit. I've flown it this past spring on a parabolic zero-gravity flight. I'm planning to do another flight this spring as well. We're bringing it into the microgravity environment and doing some short-term testing with a participant wearing the suit, which is really exciting. I'd love for NASA to pick it up and use it. I think that would be great.

Tom Abitante: I would say I would love for it to go into space. Realistically, I think what would happen first would be a long bedroom study here on Earth where subjects lay in bed all day, and they only get up to exercise for an hour and a half.

New Atlas: What applications do you see for these technologies, aside from trips to the Moon and Mars?

Tom Abitante: The applications for me would definitely be improving the technology for spinal cord injury and associated bone loss. There hasn't been much investigation into optimization to improve bone loss therapies for people who are in wheelchairs.

Rachel Bellisle: There are two possible Earth applications I can talk about. The first is that the skinsuit is a compression garment. We can use a lot of those technology developments on Earth, especially as the skin gets more advanced, making it smart and adding sensors. Can we translate that directly into medical compression environments for things like lymphedema or deep vein thrombosis prevention and things like that? Also, there's a second application that hasn't even been explored yet. The Russians had a similar suit to this, called the penguin suit. They turned it into a therapy for children with cerebral palsy. It could have some really interesting applications for rehabilitation that haven't been explored yet, and could be a really cool translation of the technology on Earth.

New Atlas: Captain Kirk (AKA William Shatner) went into space and he's 90 years old. We know that as people get older, muscular atrophy and bone loss become a very serious problem. How could this technology aid older astronauts?

Tom Abitante: Say that you're a person that loves to take care of themselves and you go to the gym every day. That hour a day you're working out, you're getting lots of really high forces, but the other 15 hours of the day that you're awake, what are you doing? You're walking and standing up, you're going upstairs. All these tiny little forces aren't the same as squatting 500 pounds, but all these tiny little forces are what you get throughout the other 15 or 16 hours of the day.

In space, they get the same thing when they work out for an hour and a half, two hours, but the other 15 hours, they're getting nothing. So how can we kind of mend that gap? You could exercise more, but that starts to create more problems. What Rachel and I want to do is fill those other waking hours with just other little things that may be equivalent to you walking around.

New Atlas: Rachel, from what Tom says, could you see a very comfortable version of your suit that could be worn all the time as some kind of gravity simulation?

Rachel Bellisle: I think it's an option. A lot of the wearing scenarios we talk about are either overnight, or overnight for like eight hours and during exercise for two hours, or maybe during daily activity. It's something that requires testing. We need to have somebody go into space, wear the suit all day during their daily activity and ask, okay, do we continue to see all of these really positive effects that were expected with the suit over the entire day that they're working? I think it is a possible scenario for later testing.

Read the original post:

How to keep astronauts healthy on missions to Mars - New Atlas

NASAs Kepler mission discovered the approximately 10-hour transit of a Mars-sized exoplanet orbiting the M-dwarf star KOI-4777. The proximity of the planet to its host star and the smaller size of the M-dwarf compared to a Sun-like star made it possible to detect KOI-4777.01, one of the smallest ultra-short period planets discovered. Researchers used the Penn State Habitable-zone Planet Finder, a high-precision astronomical spectrograph, to validate the planetary nature of KOI-4777.01. The top row shows an artists representation comparing the KOI-4777 system, with its M-dwarf host star and ultra-short period Mars-sized planet, to the Sun-Earth system on the same scale. The bottom row represents the actual distance between the Earth and Sunapproximately 160 times farther away. Credit: Dani Zemba, Penn State

The planetary nature of a Mars-sized object orbiting extremely closely to an M-dwarf star has been validated using the Penn State Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF). The planet, which was originally classified as a false positive in an automated search of data collected by the Kepler space telescope, is about half the size of Earth and is so close to its host star that it orbits in less than 10 hours. If it were orbiting a star the size of our sun it would be skimming the stars coronathe aura of exceedingly hot plasma that extends out beyond the stars surface! It is the smallest planet with an ultra-short period orbit known and could help astronomers understand how these rare planets form.

A paper describing the discovery, by a team of researchers led by Penn State scientists, appears online and has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

Ultra-short period planetsplanets with orbital periods less than one dayare extremely rare, said Caleb Caas, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and lead author of the paper. Only a handful have been detected orbiting M-dwarf stars, which are small, cool stars a fraction of the size and brightness of our sun. We dont yet know precisely how these planets form, so discoveries like these are important for helping us to constrain potential formation scenarios.

The Kepler space telescope searched for exoplanetsplanets beyond those in our solar systemby observing stars in a large region of the Milky Way galaxy. It looked for tiny dips in the brightness of stars that could indicate that a portion of the stars light was being blocked by a candidate planet passing in front of the star during its orbit. How long the dip in brightness lasts is an indication of the separation between the candidate planet and the host star, and indicator of if the planet might be habitable. These dips in brightness, called transits, would then be vetted by an automated system to identify potential false positives.

Kepler observed such a dip in the brightness of the M-dwarf star KOI-4777, but the dip was so brief that the automated vetting originally suggested it to be a false positive. A new statistical analysis technique developed by Eric Feigelson, Distinguished Senior Scholar and Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and of Statistics at Penn State, and his team of astrostatisticians, independently detected this planet at its correct period in the Kepler dataset. Later, a manual check of potential false positives in the Kepler data determined that the dip in brightness of KOI-4777 did in fact represent a potential planetary system with an orbital period of 0.412 days, or about 9.9 hours.

We used the Habitable-zone Planet Finder, a high-precision astronomical spectrograph installed on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas to observe this system, said Suvrath Mahadevan, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and an author of the paper. Given how close this planet is to its host star, it is unlikely to be habitable, but we knew from the start that we would be able to learn about much more than just habitable planets with the HPF. The precision of the HPF allowed us to statistically validate the planet, known as KOI-4777.01, and begin to characterize its properties.

Planets orbiting stars exert a tiny gravitational pull that causes the star to wobble. This wobble results in tiny shifts in the wavelength of light emitted by a star as a result of the Doppler effect, just like how the pitch of the siren on an ambulance changes as it speeds by you. HPF is designed to detect these slight shifts in wavelength in near-infrared light emitted by M-dwarf stars.

With the precision of the HPF spectrograph we are able to validate that KOI-4777.01 is indeed a planet by eliminating other potential sources of the signal, such as additional planets or nearby stars, said Caas. Although we cant yet determine the mass of the planet, we can constrain it to a maximum of about a third of the Earths massits mass if it was entirely composed of iron, the densest material from which we would expect a planet to naturally form. This makes it the smallest ultra-short period planet observed to date. Discovering additional such planets will be important for understanding how these rare planets form.

In addition to Caas, Feigelson, and Mahadevan, the research team includes William D. Cochran, Chad F. Bender, C. E. Harman, Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, Gabriel A. Caceres, Scott A. Diddams, Michael Endl, Eric B. Ford, Samuel Halverson, Fred Hearty, Sinclaire Jones, Shubham Kanodia, Andrea S.J. Lin, Andrew J. Metcalf, Andrew Monson, Joe P. Ninan, Lawrence W. Ramsey, Paul Robertson, Arpita Roy, Christian Schwab, and Gumundur Stefnsson. This work was supported by NASA Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundations Minority Ph.D. Program.

Here is the original post:

A Mars-Sized Planet Discovered Orbiting Extremely Close to Host Star Its Year Is Less Than 10 Hours - SciTechDaily

Japan revised the schedule of its space exploration plans on Tuesday, aiming to put a Japanese person on the moon by the latter half of the 2020s.

"Not only is space a frontier that gives people hopes and dreams but it also provides a crucial foundation to our economic society with respect to our economic security," Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a meeting to finalise the plan.

According to the draft schedule of the plan, Japan aims to put the first non-American on the moon as part of the Artemis programme, a US-led initiative that aims to return astronauts to the moon.

The plan also spells out Japan's aspirations to launch a probe to explore Mars in 2024, as well as to find ways to generate solar electricity in space.

Neighbouring China also aims to become a major spacefaring power by 2030, and it too plans to put astronauts on the moon, raising the prospect of an Asian space race.

In May, China became the second country to put a rover on Mars, two years after landing the first spacecraft on the far side of the moon.

Japan's announcement of its space exploration targets comes a week after Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa returned to earth after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station, becoming the first space tourist to travel to the ISS in more than a decade.

Thomson Reuters 2021

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on Twitter, Facebook, and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Read the original:

Japan Aims to Put an Astronaut on the Moon by Late 2020s, Launch Mars Probe in 2024 - Gadgets 360

Over the last one week, cryptocurrency token Dogelon Mars (CRYPTO: ELON) has surged by nearly 50%, competing with Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) and Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB).

The token is trading at $0.00000158 at the time of writing.

The meme crypto's logofeatures a Shiba Inuwith the hair ofTesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, and trumpets hisambitions to takehumans to Mars.

According to the crypto tracker WhaleStats, ELON is now the most traded token among the top 1000 ETH whales.

ELON got a boost following the tokens inclusion on 2 leading exchanges this week.Last month ELONs price increased by 119% following an announcement from itsdevelopment team.The Dogelon Mars team shared that the next stage of development will bring decentralized finance (DeFi) and staking capabilities to ELON.

Dogelon Mars is venturing into the next phase of development, building DeFi and staking opportunities with a new contract. At this very moment, construction is underway as the community leaders introduce DeFi and a new token to the ecosystem.

The team is also aiming to introduce the xELON governance token, which will be used to vote on initiatives, coordinate protocol decision-making, distribute grants from the treasury, and more.

DOGE has surged by more than 11% in the past seven days. It is trading at $0.189948 at the time of writing.

SHIB is up more than 9% this week and is trading at $0.00003750 at the time of writing.

Dogelon Mars is a dog-themed meme coin on Ethereum and Polygon.Photo: Courtesy of twitter.com/DogelonMars

See original here:

Elon Musk-Named Token Dogelon Mars Gains 50% This Week Beating Shiba Inu And Dogecoin - Benzinga - Benzinga