NASA’s MAVEN Discovers How Mars Lost Its Atmosphere

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is such a crazy, turbulent storm (the largest known storm in the universe) that it creates sound waves that travel hundreds of miles up and actually heat the planet’s upper atmosphere.

I repeat: sound waves are heating Jupiter’s atmosphere. The area above the Spot is a thousand degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the surrounding atmosphere.

Here’s the journal paper. Here’s our story.

Image credit: Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA

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Cassini prepares for final orbital “Grand Finale” at Saturn.

Erik Wernquist, the same filmmaker who created 2014’s “Wanderers” and a stunning New Horizons promotional film in 2015, has created a new video highlighting NASA’s Cassini mission’s final days at Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft will begin its final series of orbits to cap a 13-year groundbreaking science mission known as the Grand Finale. For the first time ever in Cassini’s time at Saturn, the spacecraft will fly in between the planet’s rings and atmosphere. No spacecraft has ever before flown in this region of any of the solar system’s ringed planets. After 23 orbits, Cassini will dive into Saturn’s upper atmosphere September 15 where it will be destroyed. In 2008, mission managers explored a range of End of Mission scenarios that would protect Saturn’s moon’s from Earthly contaminants before ultimately deciding on atmospheric reentry. Cassini began her End of Mission manoeuvres on November 26, 2016, when it began the first of 20 ring-grazing orbits. A close flyby of Titan April 22 will alter the spacecraft’s trajectory to begin the first of 23 orbits in the Grand Finale, which will begin April 26.

Cassini launched from Earth on October 15, 1997, and entered Saturn orbit June 30, 2004. Six months later, on January 14, 2005, the European-built Huygens probe attached to the spacecraft landed on Titan, becoming the first probe to land in the outer solar system. 

Originally scheduled for a four-year mission ending in 2008, Cassini received two mission extensions in 2008 and 2010, with the latter ending in 2017. With the spacecraft’s fuel reserves low, the Cassini team decided to end the mission. P/C: JPL/Erik Wernquist

tfw your inactive blog gets a whole bunch of notes out of nowhere and you wonder if you could ever bring it back to life

This full functional CW Keyer was built by a spanish jeweler with watches parts. He gave it to me, as a gift, ten years ago.

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Nasa astronomers discover new solar system of seven planets called TRAPPIST-1 where life may have evolved on three of them

Life may have evolved on at least three planets in a newly discovered solar system just 39 light years from Earth, Nasa has announced.​

Astronomers have detected no less than seven Earth-sized worlds orbiting a cool dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1.

TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star that is approximately 8 per cent the mass of and 11 per cent the radius of our  Sun.

It has a temperature of 2550K and is at least 500 million years old. In comparison, the Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and has a temperature of 5778K.

The six inner planets lie in a temperate zone where surface temperatures range from zero to 100C.

Of these, at least three are thought to be capable of having oceans, increasing the likelihood of life.

No other star system known contains such a large number of Earth-sized and probably rocky planets.

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Goodbye to M42 for this year.  But I’ll see you again in November.  Meanwhile I can look at this picture I took in January of this year.

www.astrotidbits.com

The Handle 2 camera, another doomed Kodak instant, 1979.