An image that has to be seen to be believed…
I’ve spent a good part of today marvelling at this image (below) from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I simply can’t take my eyes off it. It’s just stunning. Two nights ago NASA’s Mars Phoenix lander tore through the martian atmosphere on its way to the northern plains of Mars. As it unfurled its parachute it descended down to the surface a tremendous speeds. At the same time MRO was orbiting above relaying the signal from Phoenix to teams on Earth. Luckily its camera was also pointing in the direction of Phoenix and in one of the most remarkable, stunning [insert more superlatives here] images I have ever seen, the MRO team snapped this picture; Phoenix encased in its backshell, with parachute billowing above it, as it fell to the surface. You can even see the thin tethers that are connecting the parachute to the lander! Phil has a great video on his site here which sums up brilliantly what a lot of us are feeling about this image right now.
Phoenix with parachute on its way down to the surface.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.
The MRO team also released this image this evening, during the last press conference, (small version below) of Phoenix on the surface with its solar panels outstretched and gathering the sullen Arctic sunlight. Click on the image (below) to go to a larger labelled image, showing the position of the parachute and backshell. If this and all the other images, so far sent back, are a taster of things to come then this is going to be an incredible 90 days with Phoenix and its friends, at Mars.
Phoenix on the surface from MRO.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.
NASA’s Phoenix probe successfully lands on Mars
A few minutes ago NASA’s latest mission to Mars, Phoenix, successfully landed on the northern Arctic region of the red planet. The lander is now sitting almost exactly where it was expected to come down, on a slope which is tilting the lander by about a 0.25 degrees. Phoenix is also aligned beautifully east-west so should be perfectly positioned for catching the pale arctic sunlight with its solar panels.
I’ve been watching for a few hours and the last minutes of the descent, as Phoenix was travelling those last hundred or so metres, were truly exhilarating. A night I won’t forget in a while! It’s ten past one in the morning here in the UK so the first images won’t be in for another hour and a half.
We now have to wait for the solar panels to deploy but the hardest part is now over for Phoenix. Let’s look forward to 90 days (and hopefully more) of great images and even greater science.
Update: I’ve just added some of the first images which have just arrived (3:00am UK time).
Top image: The first horizon image from Phoenix
Lower image: One of Phoenix’s footpads on the martian surface.
Credits: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Phoenix lands tonight!
The NASA Phoenix probe will come to the end of its journey to Mars tonight/tomorrow morning, landing on Mars at about 12:53am UK time. To keep up-to-date with how the probe is doing there are lots of blogs and live TV feeds for you to read and ‘tune’ into. NASA will have a live feed on NASA TV starting at 6pm EDT (or 11pm tonight if you’re in the UK).
The University of Arizona has a blog here, though they might be a bit to busy to blog during the landing phase! Emily at The Planetary Society has lots of info. here and will be at JPL for the landing and press briefings. Last but by no means least Chris and Doug Ellison have a dedicated Mars Live website about the Phoenix landing here.
I’ll also be updating my shiny new Twitter feed with updates on how Phoenix is doing throughout the night. Oh yes and if it hasn’t already got enough work to do, the Phoenix probe has its own Twitter feed here.
BBC Sky At Night magazine podcast – Episode 2
Episode number two of our podcast is out now. In this episode we have an interview with Stuart Clark about the Tunguska event that happened 100 years ago this June. It’s thought that a comet devastated large parts of Siberia when it exploded over a vast expanse of forest in 1908, felling 80 million trees! Stuart investigates the importance of this event and the mystery that surrounds it for our cover feature, in the magazine, this month. Lots more in the podcast too including my interview with Paul Money about June’s stargazing highlights, storms on Saturn and how to become and astronaut. Listen to it here.
Above: This light toned storm on Saturn has lighting 10,000 times more powerful than that seen on Earth. Find out about it on the podcast. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way found
NASA have just announced that the Chandra X-ray observatory has found the youngest supernova remnant known in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The supernova, that created it, occurred about 140 years ago but wouldn’t have been observed from Earth due to it being close to the heart of the Milky Way. Here the light from the supernova would have been blocked by thick, dense clouds of gas and dust meaning that it would appear ‘about a trillion times fainter, in optical light, than an unobscured supernova.’
Astronomers have been searching for these young supernova remnants for several years as supernova formation rates suggest that there should be several around. This new discovery will help astronomers refine models for the rate of formation of supernova and also give us an insight into what happens immediately after these violent events occur. You can read the full press release on the Chandra website here.
Above: A composite image of radio and X-ray images of the newly found supernova
(Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.); Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/Cambridge/D.Green et al.))
The lure of ‘life’ on Mars
With less than two weeks until the NASA Mars Phoenix mission arrives on Mars there’s been a lot of news about how the probe is going to go about looking for life on the red planet. It’s an exciting mission and one I’m really interested in, but we have to be careful when talking about exactly what it is actually going to do. My worry is that, if people get fixed on the idea we are looking directly for ‘life’ with Phoenix they are going to miss the other important results that will, no doubt, come back from this mission.
Phoenix’s instruments will be examining the north polar regions of Mars, scrutinizing the soil there, hopefully taking the first ever direct sample of Martian ice and investigating the environment of the region. What it will not (at least intentionally*) be doing is carrying out a direct search for life, such as microbes or any other of microscopic living organism. We will almost certainly need a sample return or some extensive in-situ studies to prove that.
However, what Phoenix will be doing is using an advanced spectrometer to look for the fingerprints of important organic molecules in the gas of vaporised martian soil. A special instrument, called the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA), will be looking to see if there are any molecules or signatures in the soil samples which might signify past ‘biological processes’.
Those results will be extremely important. Previous probes such as the Viking spacecraft have done similar experiments with ambiguous results. It will be later missions (possibly the giant rover Mars Science Laboratory) that will tackle the direct search for life, potentially with a sample return mission. More importantly Phoenix will be looking at the broad overview of the martian north pole and its history.
By studying the geological history of this region it will be looking at whether the conditions for life were there in the past. That’s first and foremost a big question. If (and of course that is one big if) there was life on Mars in the past that would clearly have big implications on the search for it, on Mars, today. It’s fair to say as well that if life didn’t arise in the past, that would have just as big an implication. So how is it going to do this?
Phoenix is going to study the history of water around this region of Mars. With an advanced weather station and other sensing instruments its going to be examining both the atmosphere and the ground. With the robotic arm it will hopefully gather some of the ice and soil for analysis. These results will tell us a great deal about the habitability of the martain soil. It might be that only a few centimetres below the surface the conditions there permit life to survive against the paucity of water and harsh UV radiation. Most exciting for me is the possibility that there may be what the NASA scientists call ‘short-lived’ liquid water sitting in the cracked icy layers of soil. Although it won’t last long on the surface, if this water is there it might give us a fleeting hint of what lies beneath.
It’s certainly an exciting time for Phoenix, let’s just keep our fingers crossed for 25th May. Keep up with the mission here.
* There is a caveat here that a few missions have, through serendipitous discoveries, been able to make discoveries that they were never intended to make. It’s possible (I suppose) that Phoenix might make just such an interesting discovery.
WorldWide Telescope released
It’s finally here. Microsoft have just released the WorldWide Telescope, available (for computers with Windows only) on the Microsoft website. I’m on a Mac at the moment so haven’t had a look at it yet, but I’m very excited about it. From what I’ve seen it looks pretty impressive and I’m sure this will prove to be an important tool for astronomy education and outreach.
Abnormal antennae nearer than we thought
For a long time the beautiful colliding galaxies known as the ‘Antennae Galaxies’, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, (pictured above) have thought to have been somewhat unusual, a bit abnormal if you will. That’s because astronomers had thought they were between 65 to 100 million light years away. In order for them to be this distant, astronomers reasoned, their current appearance could only be explained by several strange intrinsic properties. To understand why they appeared this way, astronomers argued that they must be undergoing tremendous star formation, with super-massive clusters of stars and even hidden bright X-ray sources. But now new observations from Hubble seem to suggest that we don’t need all these unusual attributes to describe this intriguing merger.
Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) using the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 have found that actually the Antennae Galaxies are closer than we thought. By observing red giant stars in the tidal tails of the colliding galaxies, the astronomers found that they are in fact about 45 million light years away. The red giant stars nearing the end of their life are good for measuring distances to galaxies; as, at certain points in their life, they have a known brightness which can make them good ‘standard candles’ or distance markers. So we now know that this beautiful merging swirl confirms to our models of galaxy evolution and is in fact how we expect a galaxy merger at this distance to look.
You can read the full story here.
Top image: The Antennae Galaxies by Hubble. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgement: B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute) and James Long (ESA/Hubble).
Lower image: The tidal tail where the red giant stars were studied. Credit: NASA, ESA & Ivo Saviane (European Southern Observatory)
The Sky At Night – We just don’t know!
This month’s Sky At Night is about things we just don’t know about. Patrick is joined by Chris, Kate Land and Prof. Gerry Gilmore to talk about everything from what was before the Big Bang to dark matter and dark energy. The episode covers the topics of inflation as well as the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and even why we are here at this time in the history of the Universe. You can catch the episode on BBC iPlayer here and again (extended by 10 mins) on various BBC channels.
