Author: jlamprecht

[This little helicopter is amazingly successful. The photos and video are at the source link below. Jan]

NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity just snapped a photo of its Red Planet partner.

Ingenuity captured an image of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Aug. 3, during the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) chopper’s 54th Mars flight.

Perseverance is nearly out of frame at the top of the photo, which Ingenuity took when it was about 16 feet (5 meters) above the red dirt.

Related: Mars helicopter Ingenuity phones home, breaking 63-day silence

Unlike previous sorties, the Aug. 3 flight wasn’t a scouting run to aid Perseverance’s science activities. It lasted just 24 seconds, reached a maximum altitude of 16 feet and covered no ground laterally, according to Ingenuity’s flight log.

The mission team designed this short and simple hop in an attempt to help understand what happened during Ingenuity’s previous flight, which was cut short unexpectedly.

That July 22 sortie was supposed to last 136 seconds and feature several complicated maneuvers. However, Ingenuity stayed aloft for just 74 seconds, touching down after something triggered its "flight-contingency program."

"Since the very first flight, we have included a program called ‘LAND_NOW’ that was designed to put the helicopter on the surface as soon as possible if any one of a few dozen off-nominal scenarios was encountered," Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead emeritus at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.

"During Flight 53, we encountered one of these, and the helicopter worked as planned and executed an immediate landing," Tzanetos added.

Flight 53, by the way, was the first hop for Ingenuity in nearly three months. The little drone was ground bound for so long because rough terrain on the floor of Mars’ Jezero Crater blocked its communications with Perseverance. (All commands to, and data relays from, Ingenuity are routed through the rover.)

Tzanetos and his colleagues think they know what triggered LAND_NOW: Imagery from Ingenuity’s navigation camera likely got out of sync with its inertial measurement unit, which helps the little chopper determine its position, speed and orientation.

This also happened near the end of Ingenuity’s sixth flight, back in May 2021. The mission team soon uploaded a software patch to deal with the issue, but that patch apparently couldn’t handle what happened on Flight 53, NASA officials said in the statement.

"While we hoped to never trigger a LAND_NOW, this flight is a valuable case study that will benefit future aircraft operating on other worlds," Tzanetos said. "The team is working to better understand what occurred in Flight 53, and with Flight 54’s success, we’re confident that our baby is ready to keep soaring ahead on Mars."

Ingenuity and Perseverance landed together on Jezero’s floor in February 2021. The helicopter quickly aced its primary mission, a five-flight technology demonstration. It then moved on to an extended mission, during which it performed reconnaissance for the Perseverance team.

This isn’t the first time that such scouting work has resulted in a photo of Perseverance. For example, the rover made it into frame during Ingenuity’s 51st flight, which occurred on April 22.

Source: https://www.space.com/mars-helicopter-ingenuity-perseverance-photo-54th-flight

A fossil jawbone peeking out from a limestone seashore on Scotland’s Isle of Skye led scientists to discover the skeleton of a pterosaur that showed that these remarkable flying reptiles got big tens of millions of years earlier than previously known.

Researchers said on Tuesday this pterosaur, named Dearc sgiathanach, lived roughly 170 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, soaring over lagoons in a subtropical landscape and catching fish and squid with crisscrossing teeth perfect for snaring slippery prey.

Its scientific name, pronounced “jark ski-an-ach,” means “winged reptile” in Gaelic.

With a wingspan of about 8 feet (2.5 meters), Dearc was the Jurassic’s largest-known pterosaur and the biggest flying creature that had inhabited Earth to that point in time. Some pterosaurs during the subsequent Cretaceous Period achieved much greater dimensions – as big as fighter jets. But Dearc shows that this scaling up had its origins much earlier.

A forensic analysis of its bones indicated this Dearc individual was not fully grown and could have had a 10-foot (3-meter) wingspan as an adult.

Dearc weighed very little – probably below 22 pounds (10 kg) – thanks to its hollow, lightweight bones and slender structure, said University of Edinburgh paleontology doctoral student Natalia Jagielska, lead author of the research published in the journal Current Biology.

It had an elongated skull and a long, stiff tail. An arsenal of sharp teeth formed a cage when it bit down on prey.

Pterosaurs, which lived alongside the dinosaurs, were the first of three vertebrate groups to achieve powered flight, appearing about 230 million years ago. Birds appeared about 150 million years ago and bats around 50 million years ago.

Pterosaurs are some of the rarest vertebrates in the fossil record owing to their fragile bones, some with walls thinner than a sheet of paper.

“Our specimen, anomalously, is well preserved – retaining its original three dimensions and being almost complete, and still articulated as it would be when alive. Such state of preservation is exceptionally rare in pterosaurs,” Jagielska said.

Up until when Dearc lived, pterosaurs generally had been modest in size, many about the size of a seagull. The prevailing wisdom among scientists had been that pterosaurs did not reach Dearc’s size until the Cretaceous, some 25 million years later, with the appearance of creatures like Huanhepterus, Feilongus and Elanodactylus. Quetzalcoatlus, appearing about 68 million years ago, boasted a wingspan of about 36 feet (11 meters), like an F-16 fighter.

“In the Cretaceous, some pterosaurs got enormous. These were some of the most superlative animals that ever lived. Dearc was not close to them in size or grandeur, but it was 100 million years older. Evolution needed time to make such giants,” University of Edinburgh paleontologist and study co-author Steve Brusatte said.

“One idea is that pterosaurs only got larger after birds evolved, when the two groups were competing with each other for the aerial niches. But Dearc tells us that pterosaurs already got to be the size of today’s largest birds even before the first birds evolved, so it throws a wrench into this idea,” Brusatte added.

In Dearc’s time, Britain was closer to the equator and existed as a series of smaller separate islands. Dearc lived alongside a menagerie of plant-eating and meat-eating dinosaurs, early mammals and marine reptiles.

Dearc was discovered in 2017, with the fossil jutting out from a limestone intertidal zone after the tide had gone down.

“We were gobsmacked,” Brusatte said. “Nothing like this had ever been found in Scotland.”

They battled the tide, first using hammers and chisels and then diamond-tipped saws. But the tide interrupted before the skeleton could be fully extracted.

“The tide came in with a vengeance, and we cried as the waves lapped over the fossil,” Brusatte said. “We thought we lost it. But we decided to come back around midnight when the tide was down again, using our headlamps and flashlights. We were shocked and relieved to see the bones still there as the waves receded.”

Source: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-02-22-scottish-fossil-of-flying-reptile-leaves-scientists-gobsmacked/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=After

[This is incredible. An ancient whale that was bigger than modern blue whales. It was much bigger than the biggest dinosaurs!!! Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au1YSIUewD4

Scientists have discovered an anomalous blob of heat on the far side of the moon.

This mysterious hotspot has a strange origin: It’s likely caused by the natural radiation emanating from a huge buried mass of granite, which is rarely found in large quantities outside of Earth, according to new research. On the moon, a dead volcano that hasn’t erupted for 3.5 billion years is likely the source of this unusual hunk of granite.

"This is more Earth-like than we had imagined can be produced on the Moon, which lacks the water and plate tectonics that help granites form on Earth," lead study author Matt Siegler of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said in a statement.

Siegler and his colleague Rita Economos of Southern Methodist University discovered the heat with a new method using microwaves to measure subsurface temperatures via the Chinese lunar orbiters Chang’E 1 and 2. They also used data from NASA’s Lunar Prospector and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiters.

What they found was an area about 31 miles (50 kilometers) across where the temperature is about 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) warmer than the surroundings. This region was below a 12.4 mile (20 km) diameter spot on the surface that is rich in silicon and that is thought to be a collapsed volcanic crater. The dead volcano last erupted 3.5 billion years ago, but magma from its plumbing system is likely still sitting below the surface, giving off radiation.

"This find is a 50 km-wide batholith; a batholith is a type of volcanic rock that forms when lava rises into the Earth’s crust but does not erupt onto the surface," Economos said in the statement. "El Capitan and Half Dome, in Yosemite in California are examples of similar granite rocks which have risen to the surface."

The researchers reported their initial findings in the journal Nature on July 5 and presented additional details July 12 at the Goldschmidt Conference on geochemistry in Lyon, France.

The findings are "incredibly interesting," Stephen M. Elardo, a geochemist at the University of Florida who was not involved in the study, said in the statement. Granite is extremely common on Earth, but not elsewhere in the solar system, added Elardo.

"People don’t think twice about having a granite countertop in their kitchen," he said. "But geologically-speaking, it’s quite hard to make granite without water and plate tectonics, which is why we really don’t see that type of rock on other planets. So if this finding by Siegler and colleagues holds up, it’s going to be massively important for how we think about the internal workings of other rocky bodies in the Solar System."

Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/the-moon/scientists-discover-huge-heat-emitting-blob-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon

Astronomers have directly detected and imaged a gas giant orbiting another star by combining different techniques for hunting exoplanets.

Researchers first looked at a catalog of star-mapping data combined from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia and older Hipparcos missions to identify stars that, based on their apparent movements or wobbles, are likely to be orbited by giant — and thus potentially visible — planets.

The international team of scientists then used the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Observations using the telescope’s coronagraphic adaptive optics and spectrograph instruments in July and September 2020 and May and October 2021 led to the discovery of the exoplanet HIP 99770B, a new study reports.

HIP 99770B is a gas giant planet about 15 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting the star HIP 99770, which is around twice as massive as our sun.

Direct imaging provides information such as the composition of atmospheres around planets and their temperatures. But actually finding planets in this fashion is very difficult, accounting for only a handful of exoplanet discoveries.

However, using star-mapping data means astronomers know exactly where to look with follow-up telescope observations. This approach could bring further discoveries of exoplanets by direct imaging, potentially including Earth-like planets, scientists said.

"This is sort of a test run for the kind of strategy we need to be able to image an Earth," study lead author Thayne Currie, who’s based at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Hilo, Hawaii and the University of Texas-San Antonio, said in an ESA statement.

"It demonstrates that an indirect method sensitive to a planet’s gravitational pull can tell you where to look and exactly when to look for direct imaging," Currie said. "So I think that’s really exciting."

The paper was published in the journal Science on April 13.

Source: https://www.space.com/giant-exoplanet-discovered-gaia-star-mapping-data?utm_term=AF536F6D-055D-443A-91F7-FD448D0CCA73&utm_campaign=58E4DE65-C57F-4CD3-

A stealthy asteroid the size of a 20-story building hid in the sun’s glare before zooming uncomfortably close to Earth on July 13. Scientists didn’t notice until July 15.

An asteroid as large as a 20-story building sailed uncomfortably close to Earth last week, zooming by our planet at roughly a quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon — and astronomers didn’t notice it until two days later.

Now dubbed 2023 NT1, the roughly 200-foot-wide (60 meters) space rock sailed past our planet on July 13, traveling at an estimated 53,000 mph (86,000 km/h), according to NASA. However, because the rock flew toward Earth from the direction of the sun, our star’s glare blinded telescopes to the asteroid’s approach until long after it had passed.

Astronomers didn’t catch wind of the building-size rock until July 15, when a telescope in South Africa — part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), an array of telescopes designed to spot asteroids several days to weeks before any potential impact — caught the rock making its exit from our neighborhood. More than a dozen other telescopes also spotted the rock shortly afterward, according to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.

A diagram of Earth with a gray ring around it showing the moon’s orbit. A green line, representing an asteroid, cuts through the gray circle and approaches Earth

Despite this surprise approach, asteroid 2023 NT1 isn’t large enough to be considered a potentially hazardous object; after calculating the asteroid’s trajectory for the next decade, astronomers say there’s no imminent risk of an impact. In fact, recent research suggests that Earth is safe from asteroids — at least from large, extinction-inducing ones — for the next 1,000 years.

Still, the sun remains a well-known blind spot in the search for near-Earth asteroids — and 2023 NT1 is hardly the first stealthy space rock to slip past our detection. In 2013, a roughly 59-foot-long (18 m) asteroid followed a similar path through the sun’s glare and went undetected before exploding in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The explosion released a shock wave that damaged buildings and shattered glass for miles around, ultimately injuring nearly 1,500 people (but killing none).

While scientists closely monitor more than 31,000 known near-Earth asteroids, they are well aware of the dangers posed by the solar blind spot. To address this threat, the European Space Agency is hard at work on the NEOMIR mission. The satellite, scheduled to launch around 2030, will orbit between Earth and the sun in an effort to detect large asteroids hidden in our star’s shine.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/a-skyscraper-size-asteroid-flew-closer-to-earth-than-the-moon-and-scientists-didnt-notice-until-2-days-later

[It is fascinating about the weird past of the earth that scientists have uncovered. When I was younger, scientists used to believe, for a long time, that the earth changed GRADUALLY. But as their knowledge and tools have improved massively, they have instead discovered that lots of weird, nasty events took place in the Earth's history that were unexpected and weird. It turns out that disasters and nasty bizarre, weird things happened a LOT. The Earth is actually a dangerous planet and we are actually a fragile species. This is our only home, but our only home could kill us easily. I will return to this topic. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vntVVcazJD4&t=1261s

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJUVd8SguDw

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmW-tctT6Y4

The first stars in the cosmos may have topped out at over 10,000 times the mass of the sun, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the biggest stars alive today, a new study has found.

Nowadays, the biggest stars are 100 solar masses. But the early universe was a far more exotic place, filled with mega-giant stars that lived fast and died very, very young, the researchers found.

And once these doomed giants died out, conditions were never right for them to form again.

The cosmic Dark Ages

More than 13 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang, the universe had no stars. There was nothing more than a warm soup of neutral gas, almost entirely made up of hydrogen and helium. Over hundreds of millions of years, however, that neutral gas began to pile up into increasingly dense balls of matter. This period is known as the cosmic Dark Ages.

In the modern day universe, dense balls of matter quickly collapse to form stars. But that’s because the modern universe has something that the early universe lacked: a lot of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. These elements are very efficient at radiating energy away. This allows the dense clumps to shrink very rapidly, collapsing to high enough densities to trigger nuclear fusion – the process that powers stars by combining lighter elements into heavier ones.

But the only way to get heavier elements in the first place is through that same nuclear fusion process. Multiple generations of stars forming, fusing, and dying enriched the cosmos to its present state.

Without the ability to rapidly release heat, the first generation of stars had to form under much different, and much more difficult, conditions.

Cold fronts

To understand the puzzle of these first stars, a team of astrophysicists turned to sophisticated computer simulations of the dark ages to understand what was going on back then. They reported their findings in January in a paper published to the preprint database arXiv and submitted for peer review to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The new work features all the usual cosmological ingredients: dark matter to help grow galaxies, the evolution and clumping of neutral gas, and radiation that can cool and sometimes reheat the gas. But their work includes something that others have lacked: cold fronts – fast-moving streams of chilled matter – that slam into already formed structures.

The researchers found that a complex web of interactions preceded the first star formation. Neutral gas began to collect and clump together. Hydrogen and helium released a little bit of heat, which allowed clumps of the neutral gas to slowly reach higher densities.

But high-density clumps became very warm, producing radiation that broke apart the neutral gas and prevented it from fragmenting into many smaller clumps. That means stars made from these clumps can become incredibly large.

Supermassive stars

These back-and-forth interactions between radiation and neutral gas led to massive pools of neutral gas– the beginnings of the first galaxies. The gas deep within these proto-galaxies formed rapidly spinning accretion disks – fast-flowing rings of matter that form around massive objects, including black holes in the modern universe.

Meanwhile, on the outer edges of the proto-galaxies, cold fronts of gas rained down. The coldest, most massive fronts penetrated the proto-galaxies all the way to the accretion disk.

These cold fronts slammed into the disks, rapidly increasing both their mass and density to a critical threshold, thereby allowing the first stars to appear.

Those first stars weren’t just any normal fusion factories. They were gigantic clumps of neutral gas igniting their fusion cores all at once, skipping the stage where they fragment into small pieces. The resulting stellar mass was huge.

Those first stars would have been incredibly bright and would have lived extremely short lives, less than a million years. (Stars in the modern universe can live billions of years). After that, they would have died in furious bursts of supernova explosions.

Those explosions would have carried the products of the internal fusion reactions – elements heavier than hydrogen and helium – that then seeded the next round of star formation. But now contaminated by heavier elements, the process couldn’t repeat itself, and those monsters would never again appear on the cosmic scene.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/the-early-universe-was-crammed-with-stars-10000-times-the-size-of-our-sun-new-study-suggests