Marc Kaufman

Author: Marc Kaufman (page 1 of 20)

The Hows and Whys of Mars Sample Return

Combining two images, this mosaic shows a close-up view of the rock target named “Yeehgo” taken by the SuperCam instrument on NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. To be compatible with the rover’s software, “Yeehgo” is an alternative spelling of “Yéigo,” the Navajo word for diligent.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/ASU/MSSS)

One of the fondest dreams and top priorities of space science for years has been to bring a piece of Mars back to Earth to study in the kind of depth possible only in a cutting-edge laboratory.

While the instruments on Mars rovers can tell us a lot, returning a sample to study here on Earth is seen as the way to ultimately tease out the deepest secrets of the composition of Mars, its geological and geochemical history and possibly the presence of life, life fossils or of the precursor molecules of life.

But bringing such a sample to Earth is extraordinarily difficult. Unlike solar system bodies that have been sampled back on Earth — the moon, a comet and some asteroids — Mars has the remains of an atmosphere. That means any samples would have to lift off in a rocket brought to Mars and with some significant propulsive power, a task that so far has been a technical bridge too far.

That is changing now and the Mars Sample Return mission has begun. The landing of the Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater on Mars signaled that commencement and the rover will be used to identify, drill into and collect intriguing bits of Mars. This is a long-term project, with the best case scenario seeing those Mars samples arriving on Earth in a decade. So this entirely unprecedented, high-stakes campaign will be playing out for a long time.

“I think that Mars scientists would like to return as much sample as possible,” said Lindsay Hays, NASA Mars Sample Return deputy program scientist. “Being able to return samples that we collected with purpose is how we take the next step in our exploration of Mars.”

“And it seems that there are still so many unknowns, even in our solar system, even with the planets right next door, that every time we do something new, we answer a couple of questions that we hoped to and but also find a whole bunch of new things that we never expected.”

“I am so excited to see what comes of this adventure. And I think that is a feeling shared by Mars scientists and planetary scientists broadly.”… Read more

The Space Telescope That Could Find a Second Earth

March 25, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

This rare picture of an exoplanet (called 2M1207B) shows a red world several times Jupiter’s size orbiting a brown dwarf much smaller and dimmer than our sun. LUVOIR is after more elusive targets: small, rocky planets around bright stars. (ESO)

What will it take to capture images and spectra of a distant world capable of harboring life?

By Marc Kaufman

Air & Space Magazine |
April 2021

For all the excitement surrounding the search for distant exoplanets in recent years, the 4,000-plus planets confirmed so far have been unseen actors on the cosmic stage. Except for a handful of very large bodies imaged by ground-based telescopes, virtually all exoplanets have been detected only when they briefly dim the light coming from their host stars or when their gravity causes the star to wobble in a distinctive way. Observing these patterns and using a few other methods, scientists can determine an exoplanet’s orbit, radius, mass, and sometimes density—but not much else. The planets remain, in the words of one researcher in the field, “small black shadows.”

Scientists want much more. They’d like to know in detail the chemical makeup of the planets’ atmospheres, whether liquid water might be present on their surfaces, and, ultimately, whether these worlds might be hospitable to life.

Answering those questions will require space telescopes that don’t yet exist. To determine what kinds of telescopes, NASA commissioned two major studies that have taken large teams of (mostly volunteer) scientists and engineers four years to complete. The results are now under review by the National Academy of Sciences, as part of its Decadal Survey for Astronomy and Astrophysics that will recommend government funding priorities for the 2030s. Past and current NASA mega-projects, from the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990 to the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled for launch this year, have all gone through this same vetting process. Sometime this spring, the Decadal Survey is expected to wrap up its deliberations and make recommendations.

That puts four proposals in the running to become NASA’s next “Great Observatory” in space: an X-ray telescope called Lynx; the Origins Space Telescope for studying the early universe; and two telescopes devoted mostly, but not exclusively, to exoplanets. One is called HabEx, for Habitable Exoplanet Observatory. The other—the most ambitious, most complex, most expensive, and most revolutionary of all these concepts—is called LUVOIR, for Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor.… Read more

What Happened to All That Water on Ancient Mars? A New Theory With a Surprising Answer

March 16, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 1 Comment

How did Mars lose the surface water that was plentiful on its surface 3 to 4 billion years ago? New research says it did not leave the planet but rather was incorporated on a molecular level into Martian minerals. (NASA)

Once it became clear in the past decade that the surface of ancient Mars, the inevitable question arose regarding what happened to it all since the planet is today so very dry. And the widely-accepted answer has been that the water escaped into space, especially after the once thicker atmosphere of Mars was stripped away.

But NASA-funded research just made public has a new and bold and very different answer: Much of the water that formed rivers, lakes and deep oceans on Mars, the research concludes, sank below the planet’s surface and is trapped inside minerals in the planet’s rocky crust.

Since early Mars is now thought to have had as much surface water as half of the the Earth’s Atlantic Ocean — enough to cover most of Mars in at least 100 meters of water — that means huge volumes of water became incorporated into the molecular structure of clays, sulfates, carbonates, opals and other hydrated minerals.

While some of the early water surely disappeared from Mars via atmospheric escape, the new findings, published in the latest issue of Science, conclude that atmospheric loss can not account for much or most of its water loss — especially now that estimates of how much water once existed on the surface of the planet have increased substantially.

“Atmospheric escape doesn’t fully explain the data that we have for how much water actually once existed on Mars,” said Eva Scheller, lead author and a doctoral candidate at the California Institute of Technology. The rate of water loss was found to be too slow to explain what happened.

Scheller and others at Caltech set out to find other explanations. Based on modeling and data collected by Mars orbiters, rovers and from meteorites, they concluded that between 30 and 99 percent of that very early Martian surface water can now be found trapped in the minerals of the planet’s crust.

Mars mudstone, as imaged by the Curiosity rover. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

As described in a release for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the team studied the quantity of water on Mars over time in all its forms (vapor, liquid, and ice) and the chemical composition of the planet’s current atmosphere and crust through the analysis of meteorites as well as using data provided by Mars rovers and orbiters. … Read more

A Close Exoplanet Found That May Have An Atmosphere Ideal For Study

March 4, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

Planet Gliese 486b is close to us (in a relative sense), rocky, on the small side and may have an atmosphere. These conclusions come from studying the planet using both the transit and radial velocity techniques, which have been the primary methods used by astronomers to find and characterize exoplanets. Charts showing the presence of the planet using both techniques are in the blue boxes. (Render Area, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, MPIA)

Different methods of searching for and finding distant exoplanets give different information about the planets found.

The transit method — where an exoplanets passed in front of its sun and dims the bright sunlight ever so slightly — gives astronomers not only a detection but also its radius or size.

The radial velocity method — where an exoplanet’s gravity causes its host star to “wobble” in a way that can be measured — provides different information about mass and orbit.

If a planet can be measured by both the transit and radial velocity methods, an important added dimension can be determined — how dense the planet might be. This tells us if the planet is rocky or gaseous, watery or even if it has a central core and might have an atmosphere. So many things have to go right that this kind of dual detection has seldom been accomplished for a relatively small and rocky planet, but such a new planet has now been found.

The planet, Gliese 486b, is a super-Earth orbiting its host star at only 24 light-years away. That makes the planet the third closest transiting exoplanet to Earth that is known, and the closest with a measured mass that transits a red dwarf star.

The authors of the study in the journal Science say Gliese 486b is an ideal candidate for learning how to best search for and characterize an all-important atmosphere, and to study potential habitability, too. Future telescopes will make this kind of work more of a reality.

“Gliese 486 b is not hot enough to be a lava world,” lead author Trifon Trifonov of the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie and colleagues write. “But its temperature of ~700 Kelvin (800 degrees Fahrenheit) makes it suitable for emission spectroscopy and …. studies in search of an atmosphere.”

Artist impression of the surface of the newly discovered hot super-Earth Gliese 486 b. With a temperature of about 700 Kelvin (almost 800 degrees Fahrenheit), 486b possibly has an atmosphere.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars — The Third Martian Arrival in a Week

February 16, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

This true-color Mars globe includes Terra Meridiani, the region where NASA’s Opportunity rover explored from 2004 to 2018. Two more Mars rovers — one from NASA and the other from China — are scheduled to land this week and then later in the year. (NASA/Greg Shirah)

Mars is receiving visitors these days. Quite a few of them.

The most prominent visitor is NASA’s Perseverance rover, which made a difficult but smooth precision landing at 3.55 ET this afternoon.

The rover now sits in Jezero Crater, in an area that clearly once had lots of water flowing. The site was selected, in part, because the Perseverance rover’s official mission includes — for the first time since the mid 1970s — an effort to find signs of long ago life.

Perseverance will join the Curiosity rover on Mars, that pioneering machine that has revolutionized our understanding of the planet since it landed in 2012 The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are similar in design but carry different instruments with different goals.

A key difference: Curiosity was tasked with determining whether Mars had once been habitable and found that it definitely had been, with flowing rivers, large lakes and necessary-for-life organic compounds. Perseverance will take another scientific step forward and search for signs that Mars actually was once inhabited.

Perseverance also joins China’s Tianwen-1 (“heavenly questions”) probe, which went into orbit around Mars last week. It is the first Chinese spacecraft to arrive at Mars, and later this spring or summer the Chinese space agency will attempt to land a rover as well on the planet’s northern plains..

And then there’s the Hope spacecraft which entered into Mars orbit last week as well. Launched by the United Arab Emirates, it was placed in a wide orbit so it could study the planet’s weather and climate systems, which means it also can see the full planet in one view.

These spacecraft will join several others on or orbiting Mars, making this by far the busiest time ever for exploration of Mars — a real milestone.

NASA’s Perseverance rover will land in Jezero Crater. This image was produced using instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which helps identify potential landing sites for future missions. On ancient Mars, water carved channels and transported sediments to form fans and deltas within lake basins, as is clearly visible at here at Jezaro Crater (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

That the Perseverance mission has a formal goal of searching for ancient signs of life is a big deal, and involves a lot of history.… Read more

New Insights Into How Earth Got Its Nitrogen

February 12, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An artist’s conception shows a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas around a young star. New research by Rice University shows that Earth’s nitrogen came from both inner and outer regions of the disk that formed our solar system, contrary to earlier theory. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Scientists have long held that many of the important compounds and elements that make life possible on Earth arrived here after the planet was formed and was orbiting the sun. These molecules came via meteorites and comets, it was thought, from the colder regions beyond Jupiter.

But in a challenge to that long-accepted view, a team from Rice University has found isotopic signatures of nitrogen from both the inner and the outer disk in iron meteorites that fell to Earth. What this strongly suggests is that the seeds of rocky, inner solar system planets such as Earth were bathed in dust that contained nitrogen and other volatiles, and the growing planet kept some of that “local” material.

“Our work completely changes the current narrative,” said Rice University graduate student and lead author Damanveer Grewal. “We show that the volatile elements were present in the inner disk dust, probably in the form of refractory (non-gaseous) organics, from the very beginning. This means that contrary to current understanding, the seeds of the present-day rocky planets — including Earth — were not volatile-free.”

The solar protoplanetary disk was separated into two reservoirs, with the inner solar system material having a lower concentration of nitrogen-15 and the outer solar system material being nitrogen-15 rich. The nitrogen isotope composition of present-day Earth lies in between, according to a new Rice University study that shows it came from both reservoirs. (Credit: Illustration by Amrita P. Vyas)

This work helped settle a prolonged debate over the origin of life-essential volatile elements — such as hydrogen, water, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen, ammonia — on Earth and other rocky bodies in the solar system.

“Researchers have always thought that the inner part of the solar system, within Jupiter’s orbit, was too hot for nitrogen and other volatile elements to condense as solids, meaning that volatile elements in the inner disk were only in the gas phase,” Grewal said.

Because the seeds of present-day rocky planets, also known as protoplanets, grew in the inner disk by accreting locally sourced dust, he said it appeared they did not contain nitrogen or other volatiles because of the high temperatures, necessitating their delivery from the outer solar system.… Read more

How to Predict the Make-Up of Rocky Exoplanets Too Small and Distant to Directly Observe

January 30, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

The seven planets of the Trappist-1 solar system. The first planets were discovered five years ago and others in 2017. Trappist-1 is a dream system for researchers to study because it includes so many rocky planets. The planets do, however, orbit very close to a relatively small and cool Red Dwarf star, which makes the system and its potential for habitability different than if they orbited a sun-like star. (NASA)

In trying to tease out what a planet is made of, its density is of great importance. Scientists can use that measure of density — the amount of matter contained in a given volume — to determine what ratio of a planet is likely is gas, or water, or rocks, or rocks and iron and more. They can even help determine if the planet has a central core.

So determining the density of exoplanets is a high priority and one that has been especially important for the Trappist-1 solar system, the amazing collection of seven “Earth-sized” rocky planets orbiting a Red Dwarf star some 40 light years away.

The Trappist-1 planets have been a major focus of study since its first planets were discovered in 2016, and now a new and rather surprising finding about the density of the planets has been accepted for publication in the Planetary Science Journal . While the planets are somewhat different sizes, they appear to be all almost the exact same density. This provides a goldmine of information for scientists.

Equally exciting, while the seven Trappist-1 planets have similar densities, they are 8% less dense than they would be if they had the same chemical composition as our planet. It may not seem like a lot, but to astrophysicists it is.

“This is the information we needed to make hypotheses about their composition and understand how these planets differ from the rocky planets in our solar system,” said lead author Eric Agol of the University of Washington.

What Agol considers the team’s most robust conclusions: The Trappist-1 planets have a “common make-up” just as the rocky planets in our solar system do, but are nonetheless in some significant ways different from our rocky planets. “TRAPPIST-1 has a different ‘recipe’ for forming terrestrial planets, and a more uniform recipe as well,” he told me.

A planet’s density is determined not just by its composition, but also by its size: Gravity compresses the material a planet is made of, increasing the planet’s density.

More Weird and Wild Planets

January 13, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

A world called TOI-849b could be the exposed, naked core of a former gas giant planet whose atmosphere was blasted away by its star. Every day is a bad day on planet TOI-849b. . It hugs its star so tightly that a year – one trip around the star – takes less than a day. And it pays a high price for this close embrace: an estimated surface temperature of nearly 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius) It’s a scorcher even compared to Venus, which is 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius). About half the mass of our own Saturn, this planet orbits a Sun-like star more than 700 light-years from Earth. (NASA/Exoplanet Exploration Program)

The more we learn about the billions upon billions of planets that orbit beyond our solar system, the more we are surprised by the wild menagerie of objects out there. From the start, many of these untolled planets have been startling, paradigm-breaking, mysterious, hellish, potentially habitable and just plain weird. Despite the confirmed detection of more than 4,000 exoplanets, the job of finding and characterizing these worlds remains in its early phases. You could make the argument that learning a lot more about these distant exoplanets and their solar systems is not just one of the great tasks of future astronomy, but of future science.

And that is why Many Worlds is returning to the subject of “Weird Planets,” which first appeared in this column at the opening of 2019. It has been the most viewed column in our archive, and a day seldom goes by without someone — or some many people — decide to read it.

So here is not a really a sequel, but rather a continuation of writing about this unendingly rich subject. And as I will describe further on, almost all of the planets on display so far have been detected and characterized without ever having been seen. The characteristics and colors presented in these (mostly) artistic renderings are the result of indirect observing and discovery — measuring how much light dims when a faraway planet crosses its host star, or how much the planet’s gravity causes its sun to move.

As a result, these planets are sometimes called “small, black shadows.” Scientists can infer a lot from the indirect measurements they make and from the beginnings of the grand effort to spectroscopically read the chemical makeup of exoplanet atmospheres. … Read more

Sparkling Gifts From the Hubble Space Telescope, Thirty Years Into Its Mission

December 21, 2020 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

This Hubble image captures globular star cluster (NGC 6541) that is roughly 22,000 light-years from Earth. A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galactic core. They are very tightly bound by gravity, which gives them their spherical shapes,and relatively high density of stars toward their centers. The cluster is bright enough that backyard stargazers in the Southern Hemisphere can spot it with binoculars, though certainly not in this detail. (NASA, ESA, and G. Piotto (Università degli Studi di Padova)

For almost 30 years now, the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed how we see the cosmos. In terms of scientific output as well as making visible the splendors of the sky above us, the Hubble has been arguably the most consequential telescope ever to peer into space.

To commemorate 30 years of Hubble science and images, NASA and the European Space Agency have released 30 previously unpublished images of galaxies, star clusters and nebula from what is known as the Caldwell catalogue, a collection compiled by British amateur astronomer and science communicator Sir Patrick Caldwell-Moore.

These images have been taken by Hubble throughout its time in space and used for scientific research or for engineering tests, but NASA had not fully processed the images for public release until now.

At the end of a difficult year, they offer the glitter, the grandeur and the cosmic marvel that the Hubble provides so well and that perhaps people could use right now.

This Hubble image captures a small region on the edge of the inky Coalsack Nebula. A nebula is an enormous cloud of dust and gas occupying the space between stars and acting as a nursery for new stars. Coalsack is a “dark nebula” which completely blocks out visible wavelengths of light from objects behind it. The image was made using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in both visible and infrared wavelengths. (NASA, ESA, and R. Sahai of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

The Hubble famously entered into Earth orbit and began its mission with the calamitous discovery of a near-fatal mistake — the main mirror had been ground incorrectly and could not accomplish much viewing. The telescope was about 340 miles from Earth and never before had NASA undertaken a mission to repair a spacecraft that far away.

But in 1993 seven astronauts flew to the Hubble on the space shuttle Endeavour, spent five days repairing it and the rest is history. … Read more

The Faint Young Sun Paradox and Mars

December 2, 2020 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

This NASA image of Mars at sunset taken by the Spirit rover, evokes the conditions on early Mars when the planet received only 70 percent of the of the solar energy that it does now. (NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell)

When our sun was young, it was significantly less luminous and sent out significantly less warming energy than it does now. Scientists estimate that 4 million years ago, when the sun and our solar system were 500 million years old, the energy that the sun produced and dispersed was about 75 percent of what it is today.

The paradox arises because during this time of the faint young sun Earth had liquid water on its surface and — as has been conclusively proven in recent years — so did Mars, which is 61 million miles further into space. However difficult it is to explain the faint young sun problem as it relates to early Earth, it is far more difficult to explain for far more frigid Mars.

Yet many have tried. And because the data is both limited and innately puzzling, the subject has been vigorously debated from a variety of different perspectives. In 2018, the journal Nature Geoscience published an editorial on the state of that dispute titled “Mars at War.”

There are numerous point of (strenuous) disagreement, with the main ones involving whether early Mars was significantly more wet and warm than previously inferred, or whether it was essentially cold and arid with only brief interludes of warming. The differences in interpretation also require different models for how the warming occurred.

Was there a greenhouse warming effect produced by heat-retaining molecules in the atmosphere? Was long-term volcanic activity the cause? Or perhaps meteor strikes? Or heat from the interior of the planet?

All of these explanations are plausible and all may have played a role. But that begs the question that has so energized Mars scientists since Mars orbiters and the Curiosity rover conclusively proved that surface water created early rivers and valley networks, lakes and perhaps an ocean. To solve the “faint young sun” paradox as it played out on Mars, a climate driver (or drivers) that produces significant amounts of heat is required.

Could the necessary warming be the result of radioactive elements in the Martian crust and mantle that decay and give off impressive amounts of heat when they do?

A team led by Lujendra Ojha, an assistant professor at Rutgers University, proposes in Science Advances that may well be the answer, or at least part of the answer.… Read more

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