Eight Missions are Getting Extensions, Most Exciting: OSIRIS-REx is Going to Asteroid Apophis

NASA has granted mission extensions to eight different planetary missions, citing the continued excellent operations of the spacecraft, but more importantly, the sustained scientific productivity of these missions, “and the potential to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the solar system and beyond.” Each mission will be extended for three more years.

One of the most exciting extensions gives a new mission to the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, sending it to one of the most infamous asteroids of them all, the potentially hazardous asteroid Apophis.

OSIRIS-REx is currently on its way back towards Earth, and in September 2023, will drop off a sample from the asteroid Bennu, which it orbited for about two-and-a-half years. In October of 2020, the spacecraft successfully touched-down on Bennu, and grabbed a sample.

After it drops off the sample return capsule – which will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and land under a parachute in Utah — OSIRIS-REx will be renamed OSIRIS-APEX, which is short for OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer.  It will then head out to study near-Earth asteroid Apophis for 18 months.

Artis concept of the asteroid 99942 Apophis. Image Credit: NASA/Caltech/JPL

“Apophis is one of the most infamous asteroids,” said OSIRIS-REx deputy principal investigator Dani DellaGiustina. “When it was first discovered in 2004, there was concern that it would impact the Earth in 2029 during its close approach. That risk was retired after subsequent observations, but it will be the closest an asteroid of this size has gotten in the 50 or so years asteroids have been closely tracked, or for the next 100 years of asteroids we have discovered so far… We were stoked to find out the mission was extended.”

Apophis has a diameter of 370 meters (1,210 feet). During a close flyby of Earth in 2029, it will come within one-tenth the distance between the Earth and Moon – or about 32,000 km (20,000 miles) away.  Observers in Europe and Africa should be able to see it with the naked eye.

OSIRIS-APEX will not collect a sample, but when it reaches Apophis, it will study the asteroid for 18 months, and also collect data along the way. It also will make a maneuver similar to the one it made during sample collection at Bennu, by approaching the surface and firing its thrusters. This event will expose the asteroid’s subsurface, to allow mission scientists to learn more about the asteroid’s material properties, the team said.

The exact details of when the spacecraft will go into orbit around Apophis are still being worked out, but it will be around the time of the Earth flyby in 2029. It plans to study changes in the asteroid caused by its close flyby of our planet.

OSIRIS-APEX will take advantage of the high-resolution camera and instruments on board the spacecraft, snapping images and collecting data to provide an unprecedented study of Apophis.  DellaGiustina, who will become the principal investigator for the new mission, said that the spacecraft was designed “to get up close and personal with the object. Our spacecraft is really phenomenal at that.”

Artist rendition of NASA’s Mars InSight (Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) Lander. Credit: JPL/NASA

The other mission extensions include several Mars missions: the orbiters Mars Odyssey (in orbit since 2001), Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (since 2006), MAVEN (2014) and on the surface, the Curiosity rover (aka Mars Science Laboratory, since 2012) and the InSight lander (2018). It is uncertain if and how long InSight will be able to remain in service due to dust accumulation on its solar panels. InSight’s current electrical power production is low, and unless its solar panels are cleared by a passing dust devil or gust of wind.

Currently exploring the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons is just one of five spacecraft to reach 50 astronomical units, on its way out of the solar system and, eventually, into interstellar space. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Southwest Research Institute)

Other extended missions are for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been at the Moon since 2008 and New Horizons, which flew past Pluto in 2015 and is currently traveling through the Kuiper Belt, looking for a new object for closer study. It flew past a strangely shaped KBO named Arrokoth in 2019.

NASA  said each extended mission proposal was reviewed by a panel of more than 50 independent experts.  

“Extended missions provide us with the opportunity to leverage NASA’s large investments in exploration, allowing continued science operations at a cost far lower than developing a new mission,” said Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington. “Maximizing taxpayer dollars in this way allows missions to obtain valuable new science data, and in some cases, allows NASA to explore new targets with totally new science goals.”

Sources: NASA, University of Arizona

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Explorers Could Build Bricks on Mars with Bacteria and Pee

The famous Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky once said, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever.” Tsiolkovsky is often hailed as one of the fathers of rocketry and cosmonautics and remembered for believing in the dominance of humanity throughout space, also known as anthropocosmism. His work in the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries helped shape space exploration several decades before humanity first walked on the Moon.

The second half of Tsiolkovsky’s famous quote refers to not just living on the Earth but relying on it as we venture farther out into the cosmos. Even today, as the International Space Station orbits above at 28,000 kilometers per hour (17,500 miles per hour), those astronauts require constant resupply from the ground to stay alive. Future astronauts on the Moon might only have to wait three days to receive supplies from Earth, but as we move farther out into space, especially to Mars, this reliance will undoubtedly become far more tedious, time-consuming, and costly. Therefore, if humanity is to establish a long-term presence in space, we have to learn to use the on-hand resources we have at our disposal.

A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), in collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), has developed a sustainable method for making bricks out of Martian soil, using bacteria and urea. Mammals, including humans, are the primary producers of urea. Because they secrete urea as the primary nitrogenous waste product, they are called ureotelic animals. Urea serves an important role in the metabolism of nitrogen-containing compounds by animals. These so-called “space bricks” can be used to construct building-like structures on Mars that could facilitate human settlement on the Red Planet.

Credit: Nitin Gupta, PhD student, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

The method for making these space bricks was published in PLOS One. A slurry is first created by mixing Martian soil (simulant) with guar gum, a bacterium called Sporosarcina pasteurii, urea and nickel chloride (NiCl₂). This slurry can be poured into molds of any desired shape, and over a few days the bacteria convert the urea into crystals of calcium carbonate. These crystals, along with biopolymers secreted by the microbes, act as cement holding the soil particles together. An advantage of this method is the reduced porosity of the bricks, which has been a problem with other methods used to consolidate Martian soil into bricks.

“The bacteria seep deep into the pore spaces, using their own proteins to bind the particles together, decreasing porosity and leading to stronger bricks,” says Aloke Kumar, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at IISc, one of the senior authors of the paper.

The group plans to investigate the effect of Mars’ atmosphere and low gravity on the strength of the space bricks. The Martian atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere, and contains over 95% carbon dioxide, which may significantly affect bacterial growth. The researchers have constructed a device called MARS (Martian AtmospheRe Simulator), which consists of a chamber that reproduces the atmospheric conditions found on Mars in the lab.

In-Situ Resource Utilization

The IISc study published in PLOS One is based on a practice known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), which refers to generating products from local materials, or essentially living off the land. As stated earlier, the farther humanity ventures out into space, the more important it will be to generate products from local materials as resupplies from Earth will be tedious, time-consuming, and costly. The European Space Agency is currently working on the ISRU Demonstration Mission, whose goal is to show, by 2025, that water or oxygen production on the Moon is feasible. NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative will also develop and demonstrate technologies to use the Moon’s resources to produce water, fuel, and other supplies as well as capabilities to excavate and construct structures on the Moon.

ISRU system concept for autonomous robotic excavation and processing of Mars soil to extract water for use in exploration missions. (Credit: NASA)

Indian Institute of Science

The Indian Institute of Science is a public, deemed, research university for higher education and research in science, engineering, design, and management. It is located in Bengaluru, in the Indian state of Karnataka. The IISc Department of Mechanical Engineering conducts research in areas such as Biomechanics and Medical Devices; Fluid Mechanics and Flow Physics; Heat Transfer and Energy Systems; Manufacturing and Materials; Mechanics of Solids and Structures; Mechanisms, Designs, and Optimization; Micro- and Nanoscale Processes and Devices; Robotics and Autonomous Systems; and Vibrations, Acoustics, and Control. Nitin Gupta, who is second author on the study, is a PhD student in the IISc Department of Mechanical Engineering whose research focuses on mechanical and materials characterization of bio-consolidates, made up of lunar soil regolith, using techniques such as XRD, micro-CT, SEM, UTM, TGA, and high-rate testing.

What will future ISRU studies reveal about how we can live and work in outer space for the long-term? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

Sources: Indian Institute of Science (1), Indian Institute of Science (2), NASA (1), LibreTexts, PLOS One, NASA (2), European Space Agency, NASA (3), Indian Institute of Science (3), LinkedIn

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Large Hadron Collider Restarts, Shooting Protons at Record Energy Levels

Europe’s Large Hadron Collider has started up its proton beams again at unprecedented energy levels after going through a three-year shutdown for maintenance and upgrades.

It only took a couple of days of tweaking for the pilot streams of protons to reach a record energy level of 6.8 tera electronvolts, or TeV. That exceeds the previous record of 6.5 TeV, which was set by the LHC in 2015 at the start of the particle collider’s second run.

The new level comes “very close to the design energy of the LHC, which is 7 TeV,” Jörg Wenninger, head of the LHC beam operation section and LHC machine coordinator at CERN, said today in a video announcing the milestone.

When the collider at the French-Swiss border resumes honest-to-goodness science operations, probably within a few months, the international LHC team plans to address mysteries that could send theories of physics in new directions.

For now, Wenninger and his colleagues are sending separate beams consisting of a relatively small number of protons through the collider’s 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground ring of superconducting magnets.

Engineers want to make absolutely sure that the collider can be operated safely in the wake of the changes made during the shutdown before they start high-energy collisions — and avoid a costly repair operation like the one that had to be done shortly after the LHC was turned on for the first time in 2008.

“The machines and facilities underwent major upgrades during the second long shutdown of CERN’s accelerator complex,” CERN’s director for accelerators and technology, Mike Lamont, explained in a news release. “The LHC itself has undergone an extensive consolidation program and will now operate at an even higher energy and, thanks to major improvements in the injector complex, it will deliver significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments.”

During the LHC’s first run, scientists collected data that pointed to the Nobel-winning discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.  The second run, which lasted from 2015 to 2018, brought increases in energy and luminosity — but there were no Higgs-level discoveries. The upcoming third run is due to go until 2026.

Over the past three years, the LHC team upgraded the magnet system to narrow the focus of the beams, producing far more collisions per second. The analytical software has been upgraded as well to analyze 30 million particle-bunch crossings per second. Two new experiments, FASER and SND@LHC, were added to the LHC’s existing lineup of detectors to look for phenomena that go beyond the Standard Model of physics.

Such phenomena could shed light on the nature of dark matter, which is more abundant than the ordinary matter that we see in the universe. They could confirm the existence of as-yet-unseen supersymmetric particles, or extra dimensions, or microscopic black holes, or a fifth fundamental force of nature.

“I’ve been hunting for the fifth force for as long as I’ve been a particle physicist,” Sam Harper, a team member for the LHC’s CMS detector. told the BBC. “Maybe this is the year.”

Lead image: A ring of magnets runs through the Large Hadron Collider’s 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) tunnel. Credit: CERN / Samuel Joseph Herzog.

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There Should be More Evidence of Alien Technology Than Alien Biology Across the Milky Way

The Drake equation is one of the most famous equations in astronomy.  It has been endlessly debated since it was first posited in 1961 by Frank Drake, but so far has served as an effective baseline for discussion about how much life might be spread throughout the galaxy.  However, all equations can be improved, and a team of astrobiologists and astronomers think they have found a way to do so.  

The equation itself was centered around the search for radio signals.  However, its formulation would imply that it is more likely to see what are now commonly called “biosignatures” rather than technological ones.  For example, astronomers could find methane in a planet’s atmosphere, which is a clear sign of life, even if that planet hasn’t developed any advanced intelligence yet.

That search for biosignatures wasn’t possible when Drake originally wrote the equation – but it is so now.  As such, it might be time to modify some of the factors in the original equation to reflect scientists’ new search capabilities better.  One way to do that is to split the equation into two separate ones, reflecting the search for biosignatures and technosignatures respectively.

Graphical depiction of a modified Drake equation, and each of its constituent components.
Credit – University of Rochester

Biosignatures, captured in the new framework by the term N(bio), would likely develop much more commonly than technosignatures, captured in the new framework as N(tech).  Logically that would result from the fact that the number of planets that go on to develop a technologically advanced civilization is much less than the total number of planets that form life in the first place.  After all, it took Earth around 4 billion years after its first spark of life to develop an intelligent civilization.

But that first blush doesn’t account for a fundamental characteristic of technology – while it might have to originate from a planet with a biosphere, it certainly doesn’t have to stay there.  This significantly impacts another factor in the Drake equation – L or the length of time that a signal is detectable.  Dr. Jason Wright of Penn State University, the first author of the new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and his co-authors point out that four factors point to technology being potentially longer-lived than biology.

UT video discussing the fate of intelligent civilizations.

First, as would be apparent to anyone who is a fan of science fiction, technology can long outlive the biology that created it.  In fact, in some cases, the technology itself can destroy the biosphere that created it.  But it would still be detectable, even at a distance, long after the lifeforms that had created it had died off.  And it could do so on the order of millions or even billions of years, depending on the robustness of the technology.

If the lifeforms didn’t die off in the early stages of their technological awakening, they probably would want to expand to other planets and would take their technology with them.  Which leads to the second factor – technospheres can potentially outnumber biospheres.  For example, if lunar colonization moves steadily over the next few hundred years, the Moon would become a world with no biosphere but would very clearly have a technosphere around it.

UT video on searching for biosignatures

Moving even further up the technology tree, technology itself could become self-replicating, such as a von Neumann probe or another self-replicating system.  These would be able to leave any originating biosphere behind, but they could also potentially keep going long after whatever biology had initially created them had moved on.

That would hint at the fourth factor – that technosignatures can even exist without a planet at all, in the form of spacecraft or satellites.  In fact, this might even be the most common form of technosignature in the galaxy.  As such, the limiting factors of the Drake equation, which are all directly tied to a planet, don’t apply to technology.

Kurzgesagt explored the idea of how long technology and biosignatures last.
Credit – Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell YouTube Channel

One other factor affects how easy it would be to find biosignatures versus technosignatures – how detectable they are.  Dr. Wright and his colleagues mention that biosignature detection is challenging – in fact, we currently can’t even detect Earth’s biosignature at the distance of Alpha Centauri. Data from James Webb might eventually allow for that. But even so, radio astronomy projects such as the Square Kilometer Array are much more attuned to detecting what are clearly signs of technology.

Just how clearly is another sticking point, though, for both biosignature and technosignature searchers.  For both categories, it can be challenging to separate a valid signal from the “noise,” which can take many forms, such as muddied spectral analysis or heat signatures.  Despite that, Dr. Wright and his team make a strong case that technosignatures at least have the potential to be much clearer than any biosignatures, which are likely unintentional side effects of the growth of life more generally.

What all this means is simple – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should continue, and it is probably more likely to find a sign of a technologically advanced civilization than it is to find a burgeoning non-technological one.  Even if the civilization that created the signal is long gone, that would still hold true.  That permanence can be viewed as either a somber side effect or the happy result of years of evolution and discovery.  You can decide for yourself which way to look at it.

Learn More:
Wright et al – The Case for Technosignatures: Why They May Be Abundant, Long-lived, Highly
Detectable, and Unambiguous
UT – 60 Years Later, is it Time to Update the Drake Equation?
UT – Calculate the Number of Alien Civilizations in the Milky Way for Yourself.
UT – Could We Detect an Ancient Industrial Civilization in the Geological Record?

Lead image:
Artist’s concept of a Dyson Sphere.
Credit – SentientDevelopments.com

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Axiom’s First Astronauts Return From International Space Station

Axiom Space’s first crew of private astronauts is back on Earth after a 17-day orbital trip that included a week of bonus time on the International Space Station. The mission ended at 1:06 p.m. ET (5:06 p.m. GMT) today when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.

Former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria was the commander for the homeward trip, accompanied by three investors who each paid Axiom $55 million for their rides: Ohio real-estate and tech entrepreneur Larry Connor, who served as the mission pilot, plus Canada’s Mark Pathy and Israel’s Eytan Stibbe.

“Welcome back to planet Earth,” SpaceX’s mission control operator Sarah Gillis told the crew. “The Axiom-1 mission marks the beginning of a new paradigm for human spaceflight. We hope you enjoyed the extra few days in space.”

Axiom-1 began on April 8 with the Florida launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The trip was originally supposed to last about 10 days, but concerns about weather in the splashdown zone delayed the descent. Because of the way their fares were structured, Axiom’s customers didn’t have to pay extra for the extension.

Within an hour after splashdown, the Crew Dragon capsule was pulled onto the deck of a recovery ship, and the spacefliers were helped out of their seats to begin the readjustment to Earth’s gravity. Connor said it was an “amazing mission.”

Paying customers have visited the International Space Station before, going all the way back to California investor Dennis Tito’s trip in 2001. But those previous visits were facilitated by Russia and made use of Soyuz capsules, under the command of cosmonauts paid by Russia’s space agency.

This was the first time that an all-commercial crew, led by an astronaut who’s not on a government payroll, flew to and from the station on a U.S.-built spacecraft. (The Inspiration4 Dragon spaceship carried a private-sector crew for an orbital trip last September, but it didn’t visit the space station.)

Axiom’s spacefliers said that they didn’t consider themselves mere tourists, because they had a full agenda for their mission. There were 26 science experiments and technology demonstrations, conducted for organizations including the Mayo Clinic, Montreal Children’s Hospital, Cleveland Clinic and the Ramon Foundation.

The crew tried out self-assembling technology for future space habitats, devices to purify air on space stations, and a “holoportation” technology for two-way virtual reality communication.

Axiom Space astronaut Mark Pathy conducts a two-way holoportation session from the International Space Station, connecting with Canadian astronauts Dave Williams and Joshua Kutryk at NASA Mission Control. (Axiom Space Photo)

The private astronauts also participated in more than 30 outreach events as well as zero-gravity medical research. They’ll take part in post-flight studies to gauge the longer-lasting effects of spaceflight on the human body.

“Axiom Space is incredibly proud of this mission and these astronauts, whose training rigor and commitment to a robust research portfolio set the standard for future private spaceflight,” Michael Suffredini, president and CEO of Axiom Space, said in a news release.

Axiom paid SpaceX to handle the trip to and from the space station, and paid NASA for accommodations on the space station. In an email, NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz said the contract with Axiom included “an equitable balance to cover Ax-1 for a sufficient number of contingency days.”

“Knowing that International Space Station mission objectives like the recently conducted Russian spacewalk or weather challenges could result in a delayed undock, NASA negotiated the contract with a strategy that does not require reimbursement for additional undock delays,” Schierholz said.

Traffic to and from the space station isn’t likely to let up: A fresh foursome of professional astronauts representing NASA and the European Space Agency, is due to lift off aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom on April 27. They’ll join the seven Expedition 67 crew members who said farewell to the Axiom-1 crew on April 24. Soon after the new crew arrives, four of the station’s current residents are expected to return to Earth on yet another Crew Dragon, christened Endurance.

Axiom Space is already gearing up for its next private-astronaut mission, Ax-2, which is expected to occur in late 2022 or early 2023. And the Texas-based company has even bigger plans ahead: It’s building a space module that’s due to be attached to the International Space Station in the 2024 time frame. That module could eventually be repurposed as part of a future orbital outpost called Axiom Station.

“The Ax-1 mission is a pathfinder, showing the value of this new method of access to orbit and progress toward Axiom Station, a next-generation platform in which the benefits and products of life, work and research in space will be available to a greater number of people,” Suffredini said. 

Lead image: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean. Credit: SpaceX via Axiom Space,

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NASA is Ready to try and fix Lucy's Unlatched Solar Panel

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, currently on its way to the outer Solar System to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, has a solar panel problem. Shortly after its launch last October, engineers determined that one of Lucy’s two solar panels failed to open completely. While the spacecraft has enough power to function, the team is concerned about how the unlatched panel might hinder Lucy’s performance going forward. In an attempt to fix the problem, the team will carry out a new procedure next month that is designed to unfurl the solar panel the rest of the way, and latch it firmly in place.

Lucy’s round solar panels are designed to unfurl like a fan, pulled open by a motor that reels in a line attached to the panels’ ends. After launch, one panel unfolded perfectly, but the other only reached about 345 degrees of the full 360-degree circle, leaving about 20-40 inches of the 290-inch line unspooled. The risks of leaving the panel in its current state aren’t necessarily related to power generation, but rather concern the structural integrity of the spacecraft under the stresses of spaceflight. According to Karen Fox on NASA’s Lucy mission blog, “the team is concerned about potential damage to the array if the spacecraft conducts a main engine burn in its present configuration.”

The proposed solution, set to be attempted during the week of May 9, involves turning on the reel’s primary motor again, but this time also running the backup motor at the same time, increasing the torque in the hopes that the solar panel can be coaxed open by brute force. In other words, the solution is to pull the line harder, and see if it unfurls.

While this sounds like a crude solution, it is not being done lightly, or without forethought. Engineers have been carrying out ground tests here on Earth over the past few months, replicating Lucy’s problems, measuring the risks of the maneuver, and estimating the likelihood of success. Based on these tests, the team has devised a two-part procedure.

A technician at Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, Colorado, inspects one of Lucy’s 24 feet (7.3 meters) diameter solar arrays. Credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin.

The first part, taking place in early May, will involve putting tension on the line for a short duration, to ensure that the spacecraft reacts like the ground tests predict it should. The data gathered from this initial step will help “fine-tune” the rest of the procedure, set to occur a month later.

During step two, the twin motors will be turned on again for a more sustained period, in the hopes it will be enough to lock the panel fully open.

Lucy’s instruments are all operating normally, and it should be able to carry out its mission with or without the panel being fully latched. But it would certainly allow the team to rest easier knowing it is locked in and won’t cause problems down the road. After all, Lucy is slated for an 11-year mission visiting 8 different asteroids between now and 2033. That’s quite the journey to make with a faulty solar panel.

Updates on Lucy’s progress will be available here.

Featured Image: Artist’s impression of Lucy with two of its target asteroids, the binary pair Patroclus and Menoetius. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab/Adriana Gutierrez

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Hubble Checks the Weather on Hot Jupiters. Forecast: 100% Chance of Hellish Conditions

While the Hubble Space Telescope celebrates 32 years in orbit, like a fine wine, it has only gotten better with age as it continues to study the Universe and teach us more about our place in the cosmos. Hubble doesn’t just take breathtaking images of our Universe, but it also studies our own solar system, galaxies, and exoplanets, as well. It is this last subject where Hubble has recently been hard at work, though.

In two papers published in Nature and Astrophysical Journal Letters, teams of Hubble astronomers are reporting on bizarre weather conditions on two sizzling worlds known as hot Jupiters, WASP-178b and KELT-20b. The Nature study describes raining vaporized rock on WASP-178b, while the Astrophysical Journal Letters study discusses how KELT-20b has its upper atmosphere getting hotter rather than cooler because it is being “sunburned” by intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation from its star.

An artist’s impression of the ultra-hot Jupiter KELT-20b. (Credit: NASA/ESA/Leah Hustak, Space Telescope Science Institute)

“We still don’t have a good understanding of weather in different planetary environments,” said David Sing of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and co-author on both studies. “When you look at Earth, all our weather predictions are still finely tuned to what we can measure. But when you go to a distant exoplanet, you have limited predictive powers because you haven’t built a general theory about how everything in an atmosphere goes together and responds to extreme conditions. Even though you know the basic chemistry and physics, you don’t know how it’s going to manifest in complex ways.”

WASP-178b is located about 1,300 light-years from Earth. On the daytime side the atmosphere is cloudless and is enriched in silicon monoxide gas. Because one side of the planet permanently faces its star, the torrid atmosphere whips around to the nighttime side at super-hurricane speeds exceeding 2,000 miles per hour. On the dark side, the silicon monoxide may cool enough to condense into rock that rains out of clouds, but even at dawn and dusk, the planet is hot enough to vaporize rock. “We knew we had seen something really interesting with this silicon monoxide feature,” said Josh Lothringer of the Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, and lead author on the Nature study.

Though super-hot Jupiters are uninhabitable, this kind of research helps pave the way to better understanding the atmospheres of potentially inhabitable terrestrial planets. “If we can’t figure out what’s happening on super-hot Jupiters where we have reliable solid observational data, we’re not going to have a chance to figure out what’s happening in weaker spectra from observing terrestrial exoplanets,” said Lothringer. “This is a test of our techniques that allows us to build a general understanding of physical properties such as cloud formation and atmospheric structure.”

Hot Jupiters

Exoplanets known as hot Jupiters are exactly what their name implies, as they are planets physically similar to Jupiter but instead orbit extremely close to their parent star, often taking only a few days to complete one orbit. As is the case with WASP-178b and KELT-20b, most hot Jupiters endure searing temperatures above 1650°C (3000°F). This is hot enough to vaporize most metals, including titanium, as hot Jupiters possess the hottest planetary atmospheres ever seen. Another unique feature about hot Jupiters is that despite them not existing in our solar system they are quite common in the galaxy, as about one in 10 stars are currently estimated to have a hot Jupiter. Ironically, the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star was actually a hot Jupiter, 51 Pegasi b. The first exoplanet discovered was in 1992, as two planet-sized bodies were found to orbit pulsar PSR B1257+12.

An artist’s impression of a hot Jupiter exoplanet. (Credit: C. Carreau/ESA)

Hubble Space Telescope

As stated, Hubble has been in orbit for 32 years and continues to teach us about our place in the cosmos. Launched in 1990 onboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, Hubble was named after American astronomer, Edwin P. Hubble, who discovered the expansion of the Universe in the 1920s. The now-famous telescope bearing the famous astronomer’s name has made more than one million observations since the beginning of its mission. Recently, Hubble imaged the most distant single star ever detected in outer space, a mind-blowing 12.9 billion light-years from Earth.

Hubble as seen from Space Shuttle Discovery during its second servicing mission. (Credit: NASA)

With the recent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and no scheduled servicing missions for Hubble, the aging telescope’s days in space won’t last forever. While there are estimates that Hubble could last until the end of the decade, Hubble is slowly experiencing software failures, another sign it’s on its last legs. While it’s still functioning, what future discoveries could it unlock about our Universe? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

Sources: NASA (1), ESA Hubble, NASA (2), Space.com, NASA (3), Nature (1), Astrophysical Journal Letters, EarthSky, Nature (2), Nature (3), BBC, Smithsonian Magazine, Goddard Space Flight Center, MIT Technology Review

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