Space

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Spectrum Project



Inside the Spectrum prototype unit, organisms in a Petri plate are exposed to blue excitation lighting. The device works by exposing organisms to different colors of fluorescent light while a camera records what's happening with time-lapse photography. Results from the Spectrum project will shed light on which living things are best suited for long-duration flights into deep space.

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Squiggles in Hellas Planitia



At around 2,200 kilometers in diameter, Hellas Planitia is the largest visible impact basin in the Solar System, and hosts the lowest elevations on Mars' surface as well as a variety of landscapes.

This image from NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (MRO) covers a small central portion of the basin and shows a dune field with lots of dust devil trails. In the middle, we see what appears to be long and straight "scratch marks" running down the southeast (bottom-right) facing dune slopes. If we look closer, we can see these scratch marks actually squiggle back and forth on their way down the dune.

These scratch marks are linear gullies. Just like on Earth, high-latitude regions on Mars are covered with frost in the winter. However, the winter frost on Mars is made of carbon dioxide ice (dry ice) instead of water ice. We believe linear gullies are the result of this dry ice breaking apart into blocks, which then slide or roll down warmer sandy slopes, sublimating and carving as they go.

The linear gullies exhibit exceptional sinuosity (the squiggle pattern) and we believe this to be the result of repeated movement of dry ice blocks in the same path, possibly in combination with different hardness or flow resistance of the sand within the dune slopes.

Determining the specific process that causes the formation and evolution of sinuosity in linear gullies is a question scientists are still trying to answer.

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A small, recently discovered asteroid - or perhaps a comet - appears to have originated from outside the solar system, coming from somewhere else in our galaxy. If so, it would be the first "interstellar object" to be observed and confirmed by astronomers.

https://phys.org/news/2017-10-small-asteroid-comet-solar.html

Timshel_

Since pictures always make the most profound statements, not sure if everyone has used the zoom viewers for the large(r, est) space photos. Check this out.

Zoomables

I go there a lot, just to feel absolutely humbled. The photos seem so unreal, like computer animations used to demonstrate the universe *could* be, but it really is even more amazing that they ARE real!

Enjoy. I always get stuck there for hours looking.

Timshel_

Timshel_ wrote: »

Since pictures always make the most profound statements, not sure if everyone has used the zoom viewers for the large(r, est) space photos. Check this out.

Zoomables

I go there a lot, just to feel absolutely humbled. The photos seem so unreal, like computer animations used to demonstrate the universe *could* be, but it really is even more amazing that they ARE real!

Enjoy. I always get stuck there for hours looking.

Oh, and the easiest way to access the zoom tool is to click on the image, which takes you to the story, but then just paste "/zoomable/" on the end. Like this:

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Hubble Digs into Cosmic Archaeology



This Hubble infrared image is part of an observing program that imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters to find the brightest distant galaxies for the James Webb Space Telescope to study.

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A Window into the Past



The layered sedimentary deposits inside the giant canyons of Mars have puzzled scientists for decades. These light toned deposits have fine, horizontal laminations that are unlike the rugged rim rock of the Valles Marineris as seen by NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (MRO).

Various ideas for the origin of the layered sediments have suggested lake deposits, wind blown dust and sand, or volcanic materials that erupted after the canyon was formed, and possibly filled with water. One particular layered deposit, called Ceti Mensa, attracted attention because its deep red color in images collected by the Viking Orbiter mission during the 1970s. Located in west Candor Chasma in the north of the Valles Marineris, Ceti Mensa is an undulating plateau that rises 3 kilometers above the canyon floor and is bounded by steep scarps up to 1.5 kilometers in height.

Deep red hues are on the west-facing scarp in particular. The red tint may be due to the presence of crystalline ferric oxide, suggesting that the material may have been exposed to heat or water, or both.

Spectral measurements by the Mars Express OMEGA and MRO CRISM instruments confirm the presence of hydrated sulfate salts, such as gypsum and kieserite . These minerals are important for two reasons. On Earth, they typically form in wet environments, suggesting that the deposits in Ceti Mensa may have formed under water.

On Mars, these deposits could be valuable to future Martian colonists as fertilizer for growing crops. In a view of the colorful west-facing scarp of Ceti Mensa, we see the interior layers of the deposit, giving us a window into the past history of the sediments as they accumulated over time. We also see layers that were previously too small to view, and a surface that is thoroughly fractured, eroded into knobs, and partially covered by young dark sand dunes.

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Hubble's Bubbles in the Tarantula Nebula



The Large Magellanic Cloud is home to one of the largest and most intense regions of active star formation known to exist anywhere in our galactic neighborhood — the Tarantula Nebula.

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Polluted White Dwarf (Artist's Concept)



This artist's concept shows an exoplanet and debris disk orbiting a polluted white dwarf. White dwarfs are dim, dense remnants of stars similar to the Sun that have exhausted their nuclear fuel and blown off their outer layers. By "pollution," astronomers mean heavy elements invading the photospheres -- the outer atmospheres -- of these stars.

The leading explanation is that exoplanets could push small rocky bodies toward the star, whose powerful gravity would pulverize them into dust. That dust, containing heavy elements from the torn-apart body, would then fall on the star. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has been instrumental in expanding the field of polluted white dwarfs orbited by hot, dusty disks. Since launch in 2004, Spitzer has confirmed about 40 of these special stars.

Another space telescope, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), also detected a handful, bringing the total up to about four dozen known today. Because these objects are so faint, infrared light is crucial to identifying them.

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Hubble’s Compact Galaxy with Big-Time Star Formation



ESO 553-46 has one of the highest rates of star formation of the 1,000 or so galaxies nearest to the Milky Way.

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Infrared images from instruments at Kitt Peak National Observatory left and NASA Spitzer Space Telescope document the outburst of HOPS 383, a young protostar in the Orion star-formation complex.

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Science-Filters Study of Martian Rock Sees Hematite



This false-color image demonstrates how use of special filters available on the Mast Camera (Mastcam) of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover can reveal the presence of certain minerals in target rocks. It is a composite of images taken through three "science" filters chosen for making hematite, an iron-oxide mineral, stand out as exaggerated purple. This target rock, called "Christmas Cove," lies in an area on Mars' "Vera Rubin Ridge" where Mastcam reconnaissance imaging (see PIA22065) with science filters suggested a patchy distribution of exposed hematite. Bright lines within the rocks are fractures filled with calcium sulfate minerals.

Christmas Cove did not appear to contain much hematite until the rover team conducted an experiment on this target: Curiosity's wire-bristled brush, the Dust Removal Tool, scrubbed the rock, and a close-up with the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) confirmed the brushing. The brushed area is about is about 2.5 inches (6 centimeters) across. The next day -- Sept. 17, 2017, on the mission's Sol 1819 -- this observation with Mastcam and others with the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam showed a strong hematite presence that had been subdued beneath the dust. The team is continuing to explore whether the patchiness in the reconnaissance imaging may result more from variations in the amount of dust cover rather than from variations in hematite content. Curiosity's Mastcam combines two cameras: one with a telephoto lens and the other with a wider-angle lens. Each camera has a filter wheel that can be rotated in front of the lens for a choice of eight different filters.

One filter for each camera is clear to all visible light, for regular full-color photos, and another is specifically for viewing the Sun. Some of the other filters were selected to admit wavelengths of light that are useful for identifying iron minerals. Each of the filters used for this image admits light from a narrow band of wavelengths, extending to only about 5 nanometers longer or shorter than the filter's central wavelength. Three observations are combined for this image, each through one of the filters centered at 751 nanometers (in the near-infrared part of the spectrum just beyond red light), 527 nanometers (green) and 445 nanometers (blue).

Usual color photographs from digital cameras -- such as a Mastcam one of this same place (see PIA22067) -- also combine information from red, green and blue filtering, but the filters are in a microscopic grid in a "Bayer" filter array situated directly over the detector behind the lens, with wider bands of wavelengths. Mastcam's narrow-band filters used for this view help to increase spectral contrast, making blues bluer and reds redder, particularly with the processing used to boost contrast in each of the component images of this composite.

Fine-grained hematite preferentially absorbs sunlight around in the green portion of the spectrum around 527 nanometers. That gives it the purple look from a combination of red and blue light reflected by the hematite and reaching the camera through the other two filters.

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In the center of a rich cluster of galaxies located in the direction of the constellation of Coma Berenices, lies a galaxy surrounded by a swarm of star clusters.

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Hubble Cashes in Abell’s Richest Cluster



This cluster is called Abell 665. It was named after its discoverer, George O. Abell, who included it in his seminal 1958 cluster catalogue.

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Hubble's Cool Galaxy with a Hot Corona



Galaxy NGC 6753, imaged here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is a whirl of color.

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Emesh Crater on Ceres



This image taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows Emesh, a crater on Ceres. Emesh, named after the Sumerian god of vegetation and agriculture, is 12 miles (20 kilometers) wide. Located at the edge of the Vendimia Planitia, the floor of this crater is asymmetrical with terraces distributed along the eastern rim.

Additionally, this image shows many subtle linear features that are likely the surface expressions of faults. These faults play a big role in shaping Ceres' craters, leading to non-circular craters such as Emesh. To the left of Emesh in this view, a much older crater of similar size has mostly been erased by impacts and their ejecta.

Dawn took this image on May 11, 2016, from its low-altitude mapping orbit, at a distance of about 240 miles (385 kilometers) above the surface.

vingogly

Timshel_ wrote: »

So barring wave-length factors, do you think the billions spent on these are worth it?

The amount of money we spend on space exploration is a minuscule portion of the federal budget. NASA gets less than half a percent of the budget. Almost all of the budget is spent on social programs like Social Security and Medicare, and the military. Yet people still insist on bashing the money we "waste" on scientific exploration.

There are proposals on the table for telescopes beyond Webb - some of which will be able to gather detailed information about the atmospheres of earth like planets around other stars. There are practical reasons for space exploration, but beyond that, a society that's not curious about what's over the next mountain is stagnant.

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Hubble Catches Starbursts in a Barred Spiral Galaxy



This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture shows NGC 5398, a barred spiral galaxy located about 55 million light-years away.

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Astronomers discovered a bizarre "zombie" star that went supernova not just once, but twice.

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/11/zombie

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Earth as Viewed From 10,000 Miles



On November 9, 1967, the uncrewed Apollo 4 test flight made a great ellipse around Earth as a test of the translunar motors and of the high speed entry required of a crewed flight returning from the Moon.