The Key To Colonizing Mars Could Be These Tiny Green Microbes

Jupiter and Earth imaged together by NASA’s STEREO/HI-1A / via

ISS Symphony

Magnetic mystery of Earth's early core explained

Competing ideas suggest how sloshing motions could maintain a primordial magnetic field.

Geophysicists call it the new core paradox: They can’t quite explain how the ancient Earth could have sustained a magnetic field billions of years ago, as it was cooling from its fiery birth.

Now, two scientists have proposed two different ways to solve the paradox. Each relies on minerals crystallizing out of the molten Earth, a process that would have generated a magnetic field by churning the young planet’s core. The difference between the two explanations comes in which particular mineral does the crystallizing.

Silicon dioxide is the choice of Kei Hirose, a geophysicist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology who runs high-pressure experiments to simulate conditions deep within the Earth. “I’m very confident in this,” he reported on 17 December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.

But David Stevenson, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, says that magnesium oxide — not silicon dioxide — is the key to solving the problem. In unpublished work, Stevenson proposes that magnesium oxide, settling out of the molten early Earth, could have set up the buoyancy differences that would drive an ancient geodynamo.

The core paradox arose in 2012, when several research teams reported that Earth’s core loses heat at a faster rate than once thought1, 2. More heat conducting away from the core means less heat available to churn the core’s liquid. That’s important because some studies suggest Earth could have had a magnetic field more than 4 billion years ago —  just half a billion years after it coalesced from fiery debris swirling around the newborn Sun. “We need a dynamo more or less continuously,” Peter Driscoll, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, said at the meeting.

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Saturn V Cutaway ~ This fascinating Saturn V cutaway drawing is by far the most detailed I’ve ever come across. It’s an original, official Boeing engineering breakdown by Don Sprague and includes everything you ever wanted to know about the Saturn V’s internal workings – right down to millimetre accurate measurements … 

The planet closest to our Solar System might have just disappeared

Oops.

Alpha Centauri bb, an Earth-like planet orbiting our closest star, has just vanished. In fact, a new study suggests it never actually existed outside of a blip in the data.

The planet was discovered in 2012, and it was a pretty big deal at the time. According to researchers’ best estimates, Alpha Centauri bb appeared to have a mass similar to Earth and was orbiting its star at a distance similar to Mercury.

Best of all, it was only 4.3 light-years away – a whole lot closer than most other Earth-like exoplanets – and existed in a star system that had housed the science-fiction characters of Avatar and Transformers.

But a year after its discovery, a separate group of researchers called the discovery into question, when they found only weak evidence that the planet existed. And now a new study suggests that Alpha Centauri bb was never more than a ‘ghost’ in the data.

The research serves as a cautionary tale to astrophysicists hunting for evidence of planets orbiting distant stars, and reminds us of how hard it is to work out what’s going on using sporadic data taken from distant star systems.

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Supermoon Total Lunar Eclipse and Lightning Storm

We are not allowed to collect water from Mars. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forbids every nation in the world from sending humans or robots near celestial water sources for fear of contaminating them with life from Earth. Source

Astronomy Night at the White House

NASA took over the White House Instagram today in honor of Astronomy Night to share some incredible views of the universe and the world around us. Check out more updates from the astronauts, scientists, and students on South Lawn.

Here’s a nighttime view of Washington, D.C. from the astronauts on the International Space Station on October 17. Can you spot the White House? 

Check out this look at our sun taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The SDO watches the sun constantly, and it captured this image of the sun emitting a mid-level solar flare on June 25. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare can’t pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground. But when they’re intense enough, they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

Next up is this incredible view of Saturn’s rings, seen in ultraviolet by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Hinting at the origin of the rings and their evolution, this ultraviolet view indicates that there’s more ice toward the outer part of the rings than in the inner part.

Take a look at the millions of galaxies that populate the patch of sky known as the COSMOS field, short for Cosmic Evolution Survey. A portion of the COSMOS field is seen here by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Even the smallest dots in this image are galaxies, some up to 12 billion light-years away. The picture is a combination of infrared data from Spitzer (red) and visible-light data (blue and green) from Japan’s Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The brightest objects in the field are more than ten thousand times fainter than what you can see with the naked eye.

This incredible look at the Cat’s Eye nebula was taken from a composite of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. This famous object is a so-called planetary nebula that represents a phase of stellar evolution that the Sun should experience several billion years from now. When a star like the Sun begins to run out of fuel, it becomes what is known as a red giant. In this phase, a star sheds some of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that collapses to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful filamentary structures seen with optical telescopes.

This view of the International Space Station is a composite of nine frames that captured the ISS transiting the moon at roughly five miles per second on August 2. The International Space Station is a unique place—a convergence of science, technology, and human innovation that demonstrates new technologies and makes research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. As the third brightest object in the sky, the International Space Station is easy to see if you know when to look up. You can sign up for alerts and get information on when the International Space Station flies over you at spotthestation.nasa.gov. Thanks for following along today as NASA shared the view from astronomy night at the White House. Remember to look up and stay curious!

We’re With You When You Fly

Did you know that “We’re With You When You Fly”? Thanks to our advancements in aeronautics, today’s aviation industry is better equipped than ever to safely and efficiently transport millions of passengers and billions of dollars worth of freight to their destinations. In fact, every U.S. Aircraft flying today and every U.S. air traffic control tower uses NASA-developed technology in some way. Here are some of our objectives in aeronautics:

Making Flight Greener

From reducing fuel emissions to making more efficient flight routes, we’re working to make flight greener. We are dedicated to improving the design of airplanes so they are more Earth friendly by using less fuel, generating less pollution and reducing noise levels far below where they are today.

Getting you safely home faster

We work with the Federal Aviation Administration to provide air traffic controllers with new tools for safely managing the expected growth in air traffic across the nation. For example, testing continues on a tool that controllers and pilots can use to find a more efficient way around bad weather, saving thousands of pounds of fuel and an average of 27 minutes flying time per tested flight. These and other NASA-developed tools help get you home faster and support a safe, efficient airspace.

Seeing Aviation’s Future

Here at NASA, we’re committed to transforming aviation through cutting edge research and development. From potential airplanes that could be the first to fly on Mars, to testing a concept of a battery-powered plane, we’re always thinking of what the future of aviation will look like.

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