Tag: Solar System

Mars orbiters witness a ‘winter wonderland’ on the Red Planet (photos)

NeRD

Hoping for a white Christmas this year? Well, even if there’s no snow where you live, at least you can enjoy these images of a “winter” wonderland on Mars. Taken by the German-built High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter in June 2022, and by NASA’s NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on September 2022, these images showcase what appears to be a snowy landscape in the Australe Scopuli region of Mars, near the planet’s south pole.…

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10 most powerful solar flares of 2024

NeRD

It’s been a busy year on the sun, as it officially entered the peak of its roughly 11-year cycle of activity, known as solar maximum. In 2024, the sun launched over 50 X-class solar flares — the most powerful type of solar flare — at Earth. Solar flares are categorized by the level of X-rays they produce in a specific wavelength range (1 to 8 angstroms). Solar flare classes follow a logarithmic scale, with each flare class — C, M and X — 10 times stronger than the previous one.…

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What time is the NASA Parker Solar Probe’s closest sun flyby ever on Christmas Eve?

NeRD

A NASA spacecraft is about to give astronomers an epic early Christmas present with the closest ever flyby of the sun on Dec. 24, but if you’re wondering exactly when the ambitious solar encounter will occur, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. The NASA spacecraft, called the Parker Solar Probe, is on course for what will be a record-setting close flyby of the sun on Christmas Eve, when it will fly through the star’s outer atmosphere at 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT) and pass within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million…

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NASA Mars probe spies dusty, retired Insight lander from orbit (photo)

NeRD

NASA’s InSight lander continues to contribute valuable knowledge about Mars, even after its retirement. Photos captured in late October by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) show InSight resting on the Martian surface. While no longer active, the rover is providing researchers new data on how dust accumulates and evolves over time in the region. “Even though we’re no longer hearing from InSight, it’s still teaching us about Mars,” science team member Ingrid Daubar of Brown University said in a Dec. 16 NASA statement. “By monitoring how much dust collects on…

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BepiColombo spacecraft flies by Mercury, sees volcanic plain and impact craters

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BepiColombo just imaged Mercury in a whole new light — mid-infrared light, to be precise. On the spacecraft’s fifth flyby of Mercury earlier this month (out of a planned six flybys) BepiColombo pointed its Mercury Radiometer and Thermal Infrared Spectrometer (MERTIS) at a swath of Mercury’s northern hemisphere. Mid-infrared light is invisible to human eyes, but it carries a wealth of information about the mineral makeup and temperature of very hot rocks like those on Mercury’s sun-baked surface. The Dec. 1 flyby marked the first time scientists have ever seen…

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NASA’s Mars exploration plans need ‘paradigm shifts’ to succeed, report finds

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NASA has released a new document that highlights planned programmatic paradigm shifts in Mars exploration over the next 20 years. This plan was prepared for the NASA Science Mission Directorate’s Mars Exploration Program (MEP). The report is titled “Expanding the Horizons of Mars Science: A Plan for a Sustainable Science Program at Mars — Mars Exploration Program 2024-2044.” Core questions Highlighted in the document are several “paradigm shift” prospects to further address several core questions, which include: You may like How has the habitability of Mars evolved over the history…

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2 huge asteroid strikes 36 million years ago didn’t change Earth’s climate over the long haul, study finds

NeRD

Two enormous asteroids that struck Earth about 36 million years ago did not cause any long-lasting shifts to our planet’s climate, according to new research. The space rocks, both estimated to be no larger than 5 miles (8 kilometers) wide, impacted Earth within 25,000 years of each other. Geologically speaking, that’s a relatively short period of time, offering scientists a unique opportunity to study how our planet’s climate responded to such an onslaught. Isotopes in the fossils of tiny marine organisms that lived at the time suggest that Earth’s climate…

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NASA tests high-tech software for future mission to search for life on Jupiter’s moon Europa

NeRD

Artificial intelligence is being developed to provide a robotic brain for a future NASA mission to land on the icy surface of one of the solar system’s ocean moons, such as Europa or Enceladus. The autonomous software is being developed by teams of researchers who are making use of a robotic arm, mimicking that belonging to a lander or rover, and a virtual reality simulation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Ames Research Center, respectively. Imagine that you’re a robotic lander designed to study Jupiter‘s moon Europa, which hosts…

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Dwarf planet Ceres could be rich in organics, defunct spacecraft data reveals

NeRD

Using data from NASA’s now-defunct Dawn spacecraft, scientists have discovered that the dwarf planet Ceres, the second wettest body in the solar system after Earth, could have an interior reserve rich in organic materials — the building blocks of life. The results hint that Ceres may have enough internal water, organic molecules, and the energy source needed for life to exist on the dwarf planet. Of course, that alone doesn’t suggest the dwarf planet is inhabited. Dawn was a mission that explored Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid…

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Why we can’t just name a quasi-moon ‘Moony McMoonface’

NeRD

During the summer of 2022, just after the James Webb Space Telescope started sending us a steady stream of deep-space postcards, astronomer Stephen Finkelstein and his team found a mysterious red splotch in one of those data deliveries. They’d spotted one of the earliest galaxies humans have ever laid eyes on — a realm that represented a distant pocket of the universe our species once couldn’t dream of seeing. And, importantly, they found it on Finkelstein’s daughter’s birthday, a serendipity that blessed this blob with a name: Maisie’s Galaxy. But…

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