Category Science

On August 12, 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe was launched with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. On October 29, 2018, the spacecraft became the closest ever artificial object to the Sun. Its trajectory includes seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its elliptical orbit around the Sun. The spacecraft will undertake 24 orbits around the Sun. With this mission, scientists seeks to solve two long-standing puzzles; how the stream of particles flowing continuously from the sun, known as the solar wind, is accelerated to its tremendous velocities; and why the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is so much hotter than its surface.

Parker Solar Probe will use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its orbit around the Sun, coming as close as 3.83 million miles (and 6.16 million kilometers) to the Sun, well within the orbit of Mercury and about seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before.

Parker Solar Probe is a true mission of exploration; for example, the spacecraft will go close enough to the Sun to watch the solar wind speed up from subsonic to supersonic, and it will fly through the birthplace of the highest-energy solar particles.

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On October 19, 2017, Scientists detected the first known alien visitor, named Oumuamua, passing through our Solar System. It was about 33 million km from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon), and already heading away from the Sun. The interstellar object was relatively flat and cigar-shaped. Astonomers aren’t exactly sure where it came from, or really even what it is. However, in July 2019, astronomers reported that Oumuamua was an object of a purely natural origin. (Oumuamua in Hawaiian means “scout” or “visitor from after arriving first”.)

The Spitzer Space Telescope did not detect any heat in the form of infrared radiation from ‘Oumuamua. Given the surface temperature dictated by ‘Oumuamua’s trajectory near the sun, this sets an upper limit on its size of hundreds of meters. Based on this size limit, ‘Oumuamua must be unusually shiny, with a reflectance that is at least 10 times higher than exhibited by solar system asteroids.

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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made a fateful plunge into the atmosphere of Saturn, ending its 13-year tour on September 15, 2017. Cassini was launched in 1997 to orbit and observe the ringed planet and its many moons. The spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004. NASA extended its mission twice – first for two years, and then for seven more. The second mission extension saw dozens of flybys of the planet’s icy moons, using the spacecraft’s remaining rocket propellant along the way. Cassini discovered half a dozen moons, geysers on Enceladus and lakes on Titan.

During planning for its extended missions, various future plans for Cassini were evaluated on the basis of scientific value, cost, and time. Some of the options examined included collision with Saturn atmosphere, an icy satellite, or rings; another was departure from Saturn orbit to Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, or a centaur. Other options included leaving it in certain stable orbits around Saturn, or departure to a heliocentric orbit. Each plan required certain amounts of time and changes in velocity.

Scientific data was collected using eight of its twelve science instruments. All of the probe’s magnetosphere and plasma science instruments, plus the spacecraft’s radio science system, and its infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers collected data during the final plunge. The data rates flowing back from Saturn could not support imaging during the final plunge, so all pictures were down linked (transmitted back to Earth) and cameras were switched off, before the final plunge began. The predicted altitude for loss of signal was approximately 1,500 km (930 mi) above Saturn’s cloud tops, when the spacecraft began to tumble and burn up like a meteor.

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On August 24, 2016, Astronomers announced the detection of Proxima b, an Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. The planet, called Proxima b, is rocky and might be warm enough to host liquid water, and thus be habitable. Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years from Earth and likely to be 30% more massive than Earth. Proxima Centauri is a small, red dwarf star and shines much less fiercely than the Sun.

Despite its proximity, scientists still know very little about Proxima Centauri’s planetary companion, besides that its mass is at least 1.3 times that of Earth and that it goes around its parent star every 11 days. Therefore, Del Genio and his colleagues had to make some reasonable guesses about the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b — namely, that it had an atmosphere and an ocean on its surface — for their work to proceed.

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Scientists announced that they had made the first direct detection of gravitational waves on February 11, 2016. However, the observation had been made in September 2015. Albert Einstein had said that something special happens when two bodies – such as planets or stars – – orbit each other. He believed that this kind of movement could cause ripples in space. He called it the gravitational waves and described it in his general relativity theory in 1915. But it took about 100 years for scientists to get concrete proof of their existence. Scientists observed these gravitational waves produced by the collision of two neutron stars some 130 million light years away using a very sensitive instrument called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) in the U.S. The explanation goes that these waves rippled through the universe, effectively warping the fabric of space-time, before passing through Earth as faint traces of their former, violent origins.

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The first food grown and harvested in space – a crop of red lettuce – was eaten by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on August 10, 2015. The lettuce was grown for 15 months with a system called Veg-01, which uses red, blue, and green LED lights to grow plants in a small space. The growth of plants in outer space has elicited much scientific interest. In January 2016, U.S. astronauts announced that a zinnia had blossomed aboard the ISS. Growing plants in space is an active area of research. The latest being the experiments conducted by China’s Chang’s 4 lunar lander. On January 15, 2019, it was reported that cottonseed, rapeseed, and potato seeds had sprouted in the Lunar Micro Ecosystem, a sealed biosphere cylinder that Chang’e-4 had carried with it.

“There is evidence that supports fresh foods, such as tomatoes, blueberries and red lettuce, are a good source of antioxidants,” Ray Wheeler, the project’s lead researcher, told NASA’s website. “Having fresh food like these available in space could have a positive impact on people’s moods and also could provide some protection against radiation in space.”

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