Solar System: Things To Know This Week

ALL HAIL THE SPACE SKULL OF HALLOWEEN

omfg I wanna buy this as a poster

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

“Breakfast on Mars” by Simon Kono.

The Five W’s of an Expandable Habitat in Space

Who: In this case, it’s really a “what.” The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is an expandable module developed by Bigelow Aerospace using a NASA patent conceptualized in the 1990s. It is made up of layers of fabric that will expand when installed and equalize with the pressure of the International Space Station.

What: Sensors inside BEAM will monitor temperature and radiation changes, as well as its resistance to potential orbital debris impacts. During its time on station, the airlock between BEAM and the rest of the space station will remained closed, and astronauts will enter only to collect data and help the experiment progress. If BEAM is punctured, the habitat is designed to slowly compress to keep the rest of the space station safe.

With the BEAM launch, deployment and time on station, Bigelow will demonstrate a number of expandable habitat capabilities, such as its folding and packing techniques, radiation protection capability and its thermal, structural and mechanical durability.

When: BEAM is set to launch on SpaceX’s eighth Dragon resupply mission April 8, and will be docked to the space station for a minimum two-year demonstration period.

Where: The International Space Station’s mechanical arm will transport BEAM from the spacecraft to a berthing port on the Tranquility module where it will then be expanded.

Why: These expandable modules take up less room on a rocket, but once set up, provide more volume for living and working in space.

When we’re traveling to Mars or beyond, astronauts need habitats that are both durable and easy to transport and to set up. That’s where expandable technology comes in. BEAM is one of the first steps to test expandable structures as a viable alternative to traditional space habitats.

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People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense “periscope liberty” - a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines - and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple of days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. “A baby!” he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran. Nothing tops space as a barren, unnatural environment. Astronauts who had no prior interest in gardening spend hours tending experimental greenhouses. “They are our love,” said cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov of the tiny flax plants - with which they shared the confines of Salyut 1, the first Soviet space station. At least in orbit, you can look out the window and see the natural world below. On a Mars mission, once astronauts lose sight of Earth, they’ll be nothing to see outside the window. “You’ll be bathed in permanent sunlight, so you won’t even see any stars,” astronaut Andy Thomas explained to me. “All you’ll see is black.”

Mary Roach. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. 

This is a really interesting read - it’s got a lot of information that I would never have thought to think of (such as - will astronauts eyeballs become different shapes without gravity - weird), but it also has really good chapters about the psychology of space. 

(via psycholar)

this is wonderful - and def something I've thought about!

Mega-tsunamis in Mars's ancient ocean shaped planet's landscape

Giant waves, possibly triggered by two meteorite impacts, may have shaped Mars’s coastline and could hint at whether the red planet was once habitable

Mega-tsunamis in an ancient ocean on Mars may have shaped the landscape and left deposits that hint at whether the planet was once habitable, researchers say.

The giant waves, thought to have reached up to 120 metres in height as they raced over the land, could have been triggered by two large meteorites slamming into the surface.

The tsunamis may been powerful enough to shape much of the ancient coastlines on Mars, said J. Alexis Palmero Rodriguez, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, who led the study.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the international team, which included scientists from the US, China and Germany, describe how they set out to probe a Martian mystery.

It has previously been proposed that the lowlands of the northern hemisphere of Mars were catastrophically flooded around 3.4 billion years ago, forming a vast ocean, potentially covering several million square kilometres. But scientists have been puzzled by the lack of an associated shoreline and its expected features.

Now Rodriguez and his team think they may have the answer- the fact that it is hard to make out such ancient shorelines is because huge tsunamis buried them, depositing sediments up to hundreds of kilometres inland.

Continue Reading.

Hey! Just wondering, how did a solar eclipse prove the theory of relativity?

According to the theory of relativity space is not static. The movements of objects can change the structure of space.

In Einstein’s view, space is combined with another dimension - time - which creates universewide “fabric” called space-time. Object travel through this fabric, which can be warped, bent and twisted by the masses and motions of objects within space-time.

One prediction of general relativity was that light should not travel in a perfectly straight line. When traveling through space-time and approaching the gravitational field of a mass object, the light must bend-but not too much.

Then the English astronomer Sir Frank Watson Dyson proposed that the total solar eclipse of 1919 could prove, because the Sun would cross the bright Hyades star cluster. Star light would have to cross the gravitational field of the sun on the way to Earth, but would be visible due to the darkness of the eclipse. This would allow precise measurements of the positions displaced by the gravity of the stars in the sky.

Because of this, teams of researchers strategically positioned themselves in two locations that would initially provide the best conditions for observing the eclipse. One group stayed in Ilha do Príncipe, in São Tomé and Príncipe, and other researchers settled in Sobral, Ceará (Brazil).

Eddington, who led the experiment, first measured the “true” positions of the stars during January and February of 1919. In May, he went to remote Prince Island (in the Gulf of Guinea, on the west coast of Africa) to measure Positions of the stars during the eclipse, seen through the gravitational lens of the sun.

The total eclipse lasted about 6 minutes and 51 seconds, during those few minutes the astronomers captured several photos of the total eclipse. When Eddington returned to England, his data from Príncipe confirmed Einstein’s predictions.Eddington announced his discoveries on November 6, 1919.

Images: x ,x ,x ,x 

What caused this outburst of this star named V838 Mon? For reasons unknown, this star’s outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the entire Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002. Then, just as suddenly, it faded. A stellar flash like this had never been seen before – supernovas and novas expel matter out into space.

Although the V838 Mon flash appears to expel material into space, what is seen in the above GIF from the Hubble Space Telescope is actually an outwardly moving light echo of the bright flash.

In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the complex array of ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros), while the light echo above spans about six light years in diameter.

Credit: NASA, ESA

To discover more, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2472.html

Everyone knows that, in space, no one can hear you scream. Sound is a wave that requires a medium to travel through, and if space is empty, there’s no medium to carry that sound. Except, as Mike from The Point Studios explains, empty is a relative term. Space is full of dust and gas and plasma, just not as full of that matter as we’re used to. Thus, the question of whether sound can travel through space turns into a matter of scale. If the scale–the wavelength–of a sound is much larger than the distance between molecules, then the sound can propagate. So there CAN be sound in space – it just has to have a very long wavelength and, thus, a very low frequency. Check out the video for the full story! (Video credit: The Point Studios)