Many Worlds

Author: Marc Kaufman (page 1 of 15)

Curiosity Rover as Seen From High Above by Mars Orbiter

July 13, 2019 / / 0 Comments

A camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently spotted the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater.  The image is color-enhanced to allow surface features to become more visible. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

This is Apollo memory month, when the 50th anniversary arrives of the first landing of astronauts on the moon.  It was a very big deal and certainly deserves attention and applause.

But there’s something unsettling about the anniversary as well, a sense that the human exploration side of NASA’s mission has disappointed and that its best days were many decades ago.   After all, it has been quite a few years now since NASA has been able to even get an astronaut to the International Space Station without riding in a Russian capsule.

There have been wondrous (and brave) NASA human missions since Apollo — the several trips to the Hubble Space Telescope for emergency repair and upgrade come to mind — but many people who equate NASA with human space exploration are understandably dismayed.

This Many Worlds column does not focus on human space exploration, but rather on the science coming from space telescopes, solar system missions, and the search for life beyond Earth.

And as I have argued before, the period that following the last Apollo mission and began with the 1976 Viking landings on Mars has been — and continues to be — the golden era of space science.

This image of Curiosity,  which is now exploring an area that has been named Woodland Bay in Gale Crater, helps make the case.

Taken on May 31 by the HiRISE camera of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows the rover in a geological formation that holds remains of ancient clay.  This is important because clay can be hospitable to life, and Curiosity has already proven that Mars once had the water, organic compounds and early climate to support life.

The MRO orbits between 150 and 200 miles above Mars, so this detailed image is quite a feat.

The arm of the Curiosity rover examines the once-watery remains at Woodland Bay, Gale Crater. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Curiosity landed on Mars for what was planned as a mission of two years-plus. That was seven years ago this coming August.

The rover has had some ups and downs and has moved more slowly than planned, but it remains in motion — collecting paradigm-shifting information, drilling into the Mars surface, taking glorious images and making its way up the slopes of Gale Crater. … Read more

NASA Announces Astrobiology Mission to Titan

June 27, 2019 / / 1 Comment

 

The Dragonfly drone has been selected as the next New Frontiers mission, this time to Saturn’s moon Titan.  Animation of the vehicle taking off from the surface of the moon. (NASA)

A vehicle that flies like a drone and will try to unravel some of the mysteries of Saturn’s moon Titan was selected yesterday to be the next New Frontiers mission to explore the solar system.

Searching for the building blocks of life,  the Dragonfly mission will be able to fly multiple sorties to sample and examine sites around Saturn’s icy moon.

Titan has a thick atmosphere and features a variety of hydrocarbons, with rivers and lakes of methane, ethane and natural gas, as well as and precipitation cycles like on Earth.  As a result, Dragonfly has been described as an astrobiology mission because it will search for signs of the prebiotic environments like those on Earth that gave rise to life.

“Titan is unlike any other place in the solar system, and Dragonfly is like no other mission,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science at the agency headquarters in Washington.

“It’s remarkable to think of this rotorcraft flying miles and miles across the organic sand dunes of Saturn’s largest moon, exploring the processes that shape this extraordinary environment. Dragonfly will visit a world filled with a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and could teach us about the origin of life itself.”

 

Saturn’s moon Titan is significantly larger than our moon, and larger than the planet Mercury. It features river channels of ethane and methane, and lakes of liquified natural gas. It is the only other celestial body in our solar system that has flowing liquid on its surface. (NASA)

As described in a NASA release, Titan is an analog to the very early Earth, and can provide clues to how life may have arisen on our planet.

Dragonfly will explore environments ranging from organic dunes to the floor of an impact crater where liquid water and complex organic materials key to life once existed together for possibly tens of thousands of years. Its instruments will study how far prebiotic chemistry may have progressed.

They also will investigate the moon’s atmospheric and surface properties and its subsurface ocean and liquid reservoirs. Additionally, instruments will search for chemical evidence of past or extant life.

Because it is so far from the sun, Titan’s surface temperature is around -290 degrees Fahrenheit and its surface pressure is 50 percent higher than Earth’s.… Read more

Methane on Mars. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

June 24, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On the 2,440th Martian day at Gale Crater, the Curiosity rover detected a large spike in the presence of the gas methane. It was by far the largest plume detected by the rover, and parallels an earlier ground-based discovery of an even larger plume of the gas.  (NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS)

The presence — and absence — of methane gas on Mars has been both very intriguing and very confusing for years.  And news coming out last week and then on Monday adds to this scientific mystery.

To the great surprise of the Curiosity rover team, their Sample Analysis on Mars instrument sent back a measurement of 21 parts per billion of methane on Thursday — by far the highest measurement since the rover landed at Gale Crater.

As Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator of the instrument that made the measurement, described it yesterday at a large astrobiology conference in Seattle, “We were dumbfounded.”

And then a few days later, all the methane was gone.   Mahaffy, and NASA headquarters, reported that the readings went down quickly to below 1 part per billion.

These perplexing findings are especially important because methane could — and also could not — be a byproduct of biology.  On Earth, more than 90 percent of methane is produced via biology.  On Mars — at this point, nobody knows.  But the question has certainly gotten scientists’ attention.

The most recent finding of a return to low methane levels suggests that last week’s methane detection was one of the transient methane plumes that have been observed in the past. While Curiosity scientists have noted background levels rise and fall seasonally, they haven’t found a pattern in the occurrence of these transient plumes.

“The methane mystery continues,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “We’re more motivated than ever to keep measuring and put our brains together to figure out how methane behaves in the Martian atmosphere.”

This image was taken by the left Navcam on the Curiosity Mars rover on June 18, 2019, the day when a methane plume was detected.  It shows part of “Teal Ridge,” which the rover has been studying within a region called the “clay-bearing unit.” (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The nature and size of this most recent methane plume will, by chance, be the most widely observed so far.

That’s because the Mars Express orbiter happened to be performing spot tracking observations at the Gale Crater right around the time Curiosity detected the methane spike. … Read more

The Interiors of Exoplanets May Well Hold the Key to Their Habitability

June 23, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Scientists have had a working — and evolving — understanding of the interior of the Earth for only a century or so.  But determining whether a distant planet is truly habitable may require an understanding of its inner dynamics — which will for sure be a challenge to achieve. (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

The quest to find habitable — and perhaps inhabited — planets and moons beyond Earth focuses largely on their location in a solar system and the nature of its host star,  the eccentricity of its orbit, its size and rockiness, and the chemical composition of its atmosphere, assuming that it has one.

Astronomy, astrophysics, cosmochemistry and many other disciplines have made significant progress in characterizing at least some of the billions of exoplanets out there, although measuring the chemical makeup of atmospheres remains a immature field.

But what if these basic characteristics aren’t sufficient to answer necessary questions about whether a planet is habitable?  What if more information — and even more difficult to collect information — is needed?

That’s the position of many planetary scientists who argue that the dynamics of a planet’s interior are essential to understand its habitability.

With our existing capabilities, observing an exoplanet’s atmospheric composition will clearly be the first way to search for signatures of life elsewhere.   But four scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Science — Anat Shahar, Peter Driscoll, Alycia Weinberger, and George Cody — argued in a recent perspective article in Science that a true picture of planetary habitability must consider how a planet’s atmosphere is linked to and shaped by what’s happening in its interior.

They argue that on Earth, for instance, plate tectonics are crucial for maintaining a surface climate where life can fill every niche. And without the cycling of material between the planet’s surface and interior, the convection that drives the Earth’s magnetic field would not be possible and without a magnetic field, we would be bombarded by cosmic radiation.

What makes a planet potentially habitable and what are signs that it is not. This graphic from the Carnegie paper illustrates the differences (Shahar et al.)

 

“The perspective was our way to remind people that the only exoplanet observable right now is the atmosphere, but that the atmospheric composition is very much linked to planetary interiors and their evolution,” said lead author Shahar, who is trained in geological sciences. “If there is a hope to one day look for a biosignature, it is crucial we understand all the ways that interiors can influence the atmospheric composition so that the observations can then be better understood.”

“We need a better understanding of how a planet’s composition and interior influence its habitability, starting with Earth,” she said. 

… Read more

Exoplanets With Complex Life May Be Very Rare, Even in Their “Habitable Zones”

June 14, 2019 / / 1 Comment

The term “habitable zone” can be a misleading one, since it describes a limited number of conditions on a planet to make it hospitable to life. (NASA)

 

For years now, finding planets in the habitable zones of their host stars has been a global astrophysical quest and something of a holy grail.  That distance from a star where temperatures could allow H20 to remain liquid some of the time has been deemed the “Goldilocks” zone where life could potentially emerge and survive.

The term is valuable for sure, but many in the field worry that it can be as misleading or confusing as it is helpful.

Because while the habitable zone is a function of the physics and architecture of a solar system, so much more is needed to make a planet actually potentially habitable.  Does it have an atmosphere?  Does it have a magnetic field. Does it orbit on an elliptical path that takes it too far (and too close) to the sun?  Was it sterilized during the birth of the host star and orbiting planets?  What kind of star does it orbit, and how old and luminous is that star?

And then there’s the sometimes confused understanding that many habitable zones may well support complex, even technologically-advanced life.  They are, after all, habitable.

But as a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal makes clear, the likelihood of a habitable zone planet being able to support complex life — anything beyond a microbe — is significantly limited by the amount of toxic chemicals such as carbon monoxide and excesses of carbon dioxide.

Eddie Schwieterman, a NASA postdoc at the University of California, Riverside and lead author of the article, told me that the odds for complex life on most exoplanets in their habitable zones weren’t great.

“A rough estimate is between 10-20% of habitable zone planets are truly suitable for analogs to humans and animals.” he said. “Of course, being located in this part of the habitable zone isn’t enough by itself – you still need the build-up of oxygen via the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis and certain planetary biogeochemical cycles.”

 

A rendering of the exoplanet Kepler 442 b, compared in size to  Earth.  Kepler 442 b was detected using the Kepler Space Telescope and is 0ne of a handful of planets found so far deemed to be most likely to be habitable. But it’s 1200 light-years away, so learning its secrets will be challenging.

… Read more

A Grand Global Competition to Name 100 ExoWorlds

June 7, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Within the framework of its 100th anniversary commemorations, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is organising the IAU100 NameExoWorlds global competition that allows any country in the world to give a popular name to a selected exoplanet and its host star. Exoplanet rendering by IAU.

Four years ago, the International Astronomical Union organized a competition to give popular names to 14 stars and 31 exoplanets that orbit them.  The event encouraged 570,000 people to vote and the iconic planet 51 Pegasi b became “Dimidium, ” 55 Cancri b became “Galileo,” and (among others) Formalhaut b became “Dagon.”

It remains unclear how often those popular names are used in either scientific papers or writing about the papers.  But the idea of giving mythical names, names that describe something unique about the planet (or star)  or that nod to famous astronomer or iconic writers has caught on and the IAU has a new naming contest up and running.

This one is the IAU NameExoWorlds global campaign, and almost 100 nations have signed up to organize public national campaigns that will  give new names to a selected exoplanet and its host star.

“This exciting event invites everyone worldwide to think about their collective place in the universe, while stimulating creativity and global citizenship,” shared Debra Elmegreen, IAU President Elect. “The NameExoWorlds initiative reminds us that we are all together under one sky.”

From a large sample of well-studied, confirmed exoplanets and their host stars, the IAU NameExoWorlds Steering Committee assigned a star-planet system to each country, taking into account associations with the country and the visibility of the host star from most of the country.

The national campaigns will be carried out from June to November 2019 and, after final validation by that NameExoWorlds Steering Committee, the global results will be announced in December 2019. The winning names will be used freely in parallel with the existing technical scientific names.

The bulge of the Milky Way, as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Our galaxy is inferred to have hundreds of billions of stars, and even more planets. (NASA, ESA, and T. Brown (STScI);

 

The naming contest flows from the well-established fact that exoplanets are everywhere — at least one around most stars, scientists have concluded.  Some 4,500 exoplanets have been identified so far, but this is but the beginning.  Astronomers are confident there are hundreds of billions of exoplanets — ranging from small and rocky like Earth to massive gas giants much larger than Jupiter — in our galaxy reaches into the many billions.… Read more

A Magical Solar Eclipse From 1900, Recovered and Instructive

May 31, 2019 / / 0 Comments

 

Sometimes relics from the past help put the present into better focus.

Recovered footage of a 1900 total eclipse of the sun — believed to be the first captured — has been scanned, restored and then reassembled and retimed frame by frame to create a memorable and kind of spooky look at early astronomy. The film was found at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, reconstructed by the British Film Institute and made public this week.

As explained in a release from the two societies, the film was taken by one Nevil Maskelyne, a British magician, card sharp, levitator and more turned pioneering filmmaker and astronomer.

The eclipse was captured during an expedition to North Carolina with the British Astronomical Association.  As the release explained, at the time magic, the paranormal and science often fit comfortably together, and the emerging film industry was a tool for all and an instigator of invention.

“It was not an easy feat to film,” the release reports. “Maskelyne had to make a special telescopic adapter for his camera to capture the event. ”

The North Carolina expedition was Maskelyne’s second attempt to film a solar eclipse, but the only one to have survived — though it was also considered lost for decades.  He also had traveled to India in 1898 to photograph the phenomenon and apparently succeeded, though his film can was said to be stolen on the way home.

 

Light curve of star as an exoplanet transits between it and an observing telescope.

 

Compelling on its own, the footage also conveniently provides an exaggerated and instructive example of the primary technique now used to discover distant exoplanets: the “transit” method invented a century after Maskelyne filmed his eclipse.

But unlike what occurs a full solar eclipse,  when the moon blots out the sun as viewed from Earth,  the transit method measures the light from a host star to determine whether it dips ever so slightly — a sign that a planet is blocking some of the star’s light.

There are, of course, no total eclipses from transiting exoplanets because the planets are so much smaller than the suns.  But you get the idea.

You perhaps also get the idea that there has long been a certain showmanship in the display of astronomical wonders.  Space agencies certainly understand that and — with some turning of the nobs to make astronomical phenomenon appear in ways our eyes can take them in most dramatically  — have created some of the most majestic and magical images of our times.… Read more

The Message of Really, Really Extreme Life

May 28, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Hydrothermal system at Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression, where uniquely extreme life has been found in salt chimneys and surrounding water. The yellow deposits are a variety of sulphates and the red areas are deposits of iron oxides. Copper salts color the water green. (Felipe Gomez/Europlanet 2020 RI)

Ethiopia’s Dallol volcano and hot springs have created an environment about as hostile to life as can be imagined.

Temperatures in the supersaturated water reach more than 200 degrees F (94 C) and are reported to approach pure acidity, with an extraordinarily low pH of  0.25.  The environment is also highly salty, with salt chimneys common.

Yet researchers have just reported finding ultra-small bacteria living in one of the acidic, super-hot salt chimneys.  The bacteria are tiny — up to 20 times smaller than the average bacteria — but they are alive and in their own way thriving.

In the world of extremophiles, these nanohaloarchaeles order bacteria are certainly on the very edge of comprehension.  But much the same can be said of organisms that can withstand massive doses of radiation, that survive deep below the Earth’s surface with no hint of life support from the sun and its creations, that keep alive deep in glacier ice and even floating high in the atmosphere.  And as we know, spacecraft have to be well sterilized because bacteria (in hibernation) aboard can survive the trip to the moon or Mars.

Not life it is generally understood.  But the myriad extremophiles found around the globe in recent decades have brought home the reality that we really don’t know where and how life can survive;  indeed, these extremophiles often need their conditions to be super-severe to succeed.

And that’s what makes them so important for the search for life beyond Earth.  They are proof of concept that some life may well need planetary and atmospheric conditions that would have been considered utterly uninhabitable not long ago.

 

Montage from the Dallol site: (A) the sampling site, (B) the small chimneys (temperature of water 90 ºC. (C) D9 sample from a small chimney in (A). (D-L) Scanning Electron Microscope and (M-O) Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope images of sample D9 showing the morphologies of ultra-small microorganisms entombed in the mineral layers. (Gomez et al/Europlanet 2020 Research Infrastructure)

The unusual and extreme life and geochemistry of Dallol has been studied by a team led by Felipe Gómez from Astrobiology Center in Spain.… Read more

NExSS 2.0

May 13, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Finding new worlds can be an individual effort, a team effort, an institutional effort. The same can be said for characterizing exoplanets and understanding how they are affected by their suns and other planets in their solar systems. When it comes to the search for possible life on exoplanets, the questions and challenges are too great for anything but a community. NASA’s NExSS initiative has been an effort to help organize, cross-fertilize and promote that community. This artist’s concept Kepler-47, the first two-star systems with multiple planets orbiting the two suns, suggests just how difficult the road ahead will be. ( NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

 

The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS,”  began four years ago as a NASA initiative to bring together a wide range of scientists involved generally in the search for life on planets outside our solar system.

With teams from seventeen academic and NASA centers, NExSS was founded on the conviction that this search needed scientists from a range of disciplines working in collaboration to address the basic questions of the fast-growing field.

Among the key goals:  to investigate just how different, or how similar, different exoplanets are from each other; to determine what components are present on particular exoplanets and especially in their atmospheres (if they have one);  to learn how the stars and neighboring exoplanets interact to support (or not support) the potential of life;  to better understand how the initial formation of planets affects habitability, and what role climate plays as well.

Then there’s the  question that all the others feed in to:  what might scientists look for in terms of signatures of life on distant planets?

Not questions that can be answered alone by the often “stove-piped” science disciplines — where a scientist knows his or her astrophysics or geology or geochemistry very well, but is uncomfortable and unschooled in how other disciplines might be essential to understanding the big questions of exoplanets.

 

The original NExSS team was selected from groups that had won NASA grants and might want to collaborate with other scientists with overlapping interests and goals  but often from different disciplines. (NASA)

The original idea for this kind of interdisciplinary group came out of NASA’s Astrobiology Program, and especially from NASA astrobiology director Mary Voytek and colleague Shawn Domogal-Goldman of the Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as Doug Hudgins of NASA Astrophysics.  It was something of a gamble, since scientists who joined would essentially volunteer their time and work and would be asked to collaborate with other scientists in often new ways.… Read more

Many Worlds Interruptus

May 10, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I regret that I haven’t been able to file Many Worlds posts for a while, but here is why:

 

X-ray of my wife’s broken ankle

The broken part of my wife’s ankle is the traingle of bone floating near the tibia, to which it should be attached.

She’s had surgery and isn’t supposed to be walking on it for a month.  But now, with the help of several screws holding parts together, she is on the mend.

New posts coming next week!

 … Read more

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