Tag: nasa
NASA aces test of robot balloon that could one day explore Venus
NASA finds Earth’s moon didn’t need hundreds of years to form. Try hours.
![Astronauts seeing the moon from the International Space Station](https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/03k9VY3BEFqgY1F2It7ufzF/hero-image.jpg)
When the universe has seemed a vast, lonely place, people have taken comfort in Earth’s steadfast companion — the moon — ever-marching through space with this planet on an odyssey around the sun.
But at one time, some 4.5 billion years ago, the moon wasn’t around. And despite its being Earth’s cosmic bestie and closest neighbor, scientists still aren’t sure how it got there.
Since the 1980s, the leading theory has been that a massive planet, perhaps the size of Mars, crashed into Earth billions of years ago, spattering a world’s worth of gas, magma, and metals that forged the moon over tens to hundreds of years. A study published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests a bold new idea: The moon could have formed in one swift exchange, with a large chunk of baby Earth and its impactor’s material blown into a wide orbit — in a matter of hours.
If true, the research, which centered on hundreds of extremely high-resolution computer simulations of such a collision, could help resolve a longstanding head-scratcher for scientists about why the lunar crust seems so darn similar to Earth. It also provides potential answers to why the moon is tilted and has a thin outer layer. Cosmologists yearn to piece together what happened not only to flesh out the moon’s origin story, but explain a defining moment in Earth’s evolution.
NASA and collaborators put together a quick two-minute animation that attempts to show how the new model would unfold. A planet, which scientists have dubbed “Theia” over the decades, whacks a primitive version of Earth like a paint ball, casting off a mixture of planetary guts. Rather than forming a thin disk of debris, though, it divides into another blob, yo-yoing material between them. The gravity of Earth hurls the smaller body onward, but it survives. The umbilical severs.
This dance of destruction is contrasted by a musical score of lullaby-like plinking on a marimba.
“I’ve always thought it would be great to actually have some, as it were, real sound effects, getting some explosions in there,” Jacob Kegerreis, lead author on the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at NASA Ames Research Center in California, joked with Mashable.
“I’ve always thought it would be great to actually have some, as it were, real sound effects, getting some explosions in there.”
Scientists have run computer models of the giant impact in lower resolution for years, without two bodies splitting apart. In this case, NASA teamed up with Durham University’s Institute of Computational Cosmology in England to perform simulations that were up to 1,000 times higher resolution than the standard, testing and observing different crash angles, speeds, planet spins, and sizes.
What emerged from the boosted computing power were behaviors that weren’t seen in previous research. And when there was some earlier, sparing evidence of a crash that could split into two blobs, researchers doubted the result as a numerical problem with their model, Kegerreis said.
This new model uses hundreds of millions of tiny particles to represent the planet bits. In theory, if they can describe how those materials interact through gravity, pressure, and heat, the system should behave accurately, he said.
Kegerreis explains the concept with an analogy of dropping a ball to break it apart.
“If you build that ball out of little Lego pieces and you only have 50 of them, it might just split perfectly in an unrealistic way,” he said. “But if you have thousands or millions of them, you might start to find the way that it actually fragments in a more realistic way, and it’s that same kind of idea.”
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About a decade ago, scientists scrutinized the giant-impact theory over a chemical controversy. Researchers analyzing Apollo moon samples in the 21st century had found that the lunar rocks had the same chemical signature as Earth’s mantle, yet Mars meteorites and objects from other parts of the solar system have different compositions. That would suggest non-Earth sources should look pretty different.
How, then, could the moon be made of an amalgam of the Earth and a mystery planet with no traces of otherworldly chemical signatures, they’ve wondered?
Scientists continue to debate the issue. Meanwhile, the new NASA computer simulation has the advantage of resulting in a moon made from mostly Earth stock.
Understanding the composition of the moon isn’t easy, in part because scientists are basing their knowledge on a small collection of rocks from a tiny area near the moon’s equator. NASA scientists look forward to the Artemis moon-landing missions that will explore an entirely different region to gather more data, including samples mined from deeper within the moon.
What excites cosmologists like Kegerreis is how the study opens up new options to consider how the moon formed.
“On the one hand, [these events] are absolutely very violent and somewhat disruptive, but they’re also highly constructive,” he said, adding that there were likely other important collisions before Theia. “We’re certainly lucky that they aren’t happening frequently nowadays, but they were a key part in leading the Earth toward its habitable state today.”
NASA swooped over ocean world Europa and captured weird, stunning footage
![a close-up view of Jupiter's moon Europa](https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/03l4Dn48OT42VTMy1YtX8r1/hero-image.jpg)
Beyond Earth, there are likely other oceans in our solar system.
Planetary scientists suspect Jupiter’s cracked, ice-blanketed moon Europa harbors a particularly voluminous sea, some 40 to 100 miles deep. Now, for just the third time ever, a spacecraft flew by the icy moon, swooping only 219 miles from Europa’s surface. The other two flybys happened over two decades ago. NASA’s Juno spacecraft, famous for its dazzling views of Jupiter’s roiling clouds, captured some of the clearest, high-resolution images of Europa ever seen, which you can see below.
But that’s not all. Juno’s specialized instruments penetrated through parts of Europa’s ice, which is some 10 to 15 miles thick. This unprecedented data will be parsed by NASA and other researchers to reveal what lies in the icy shell, like potential pockets of water. So stay tuned, in the coming months, for what NASA found.
“Europa is of incredible interest — a high priority target for science,” Scott Bolton, the Juno mission’s principle investigator, told Mashable.
Life thrives in Earth’s salty oceans. There’s certainly no evidence of life on Europa, but it could harbor environments that host life (as we know it). In other words, this moon could be a “habitable” world in space.
“It’s one of few places that potentially has the conditions for habitability,” Bolton emphasized. Bolton works at the Southwest Research Institute, a research organization that often partners with NASA.
NASA released its first official image from this close flyby on Sept. 29. It shows Europa’s wild, icy, cracked crust in a region near the equator dubbed “Annwn Regio.” The terrain is rugged and has been repeatedly fractured apart. Slushy ice, perhaps supplied from relatively warmer regions below, may have filled these cracks.
![a view of Europa's icy shell](https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/03l4Dn48OT42VTMy1YtX8r1/images-1.fill.size_2000x480.v1664485838.jpg)
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SWRI / MSSS
“It’s very early in the process, but by all indications Juno’s flyby of Europa was a great success,” Bolton said in a statement when the first image was released. “This first picture is just a glimpse of the remarkable new science to come from Juno’s entire suite of instruments and sensors that acquired data as we skimmed over the moon’s icy crust.”
Then, on Oct. 5, NASA released the highest resolution image ever snapped by the Juno spacecraft. The image below (encompassing an area 93 miles across and 125 miles high) shows an area crisscrossed with grooves and ridges. Of note are the peculiar darker blotches. “Near the upper right of the image, as well as just to the right and below center, are dark stains possibly linked to something from below erupting onto the surface,” writes NASA. “Below center and to the right is a surface feature that recalls a musical quarter note, measuring 42 miles (67 kilometers) north-south by 23 miles (37 kilometers) east-west.”
![an up-close view of the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa](https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/03l4Dn48OT42VTMy1YtX8r1/images-3.fill.size_2000x2000.v1665006426.jpg)
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI
What’s more, all of the imagery captured by Juno is made available for the public — more specifically “citizen scientists” with impressive photo skills and a keen interest in astronomy — to process. Just below is an image tweeted out by professional imaging processor Jason Terry. And under that is a “raw” unprocessed Europa image that NASA posted online.
![Jupiter's moon Europa](https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/03l4Dn48OT42VTMy1YtX8r1/images-2.fill.size_2000x2000.v1664632812.jpg)
Credit: NASA / SwRI / MSSS
These new close-up images are like a treasure trove for planetary scientists. Before, they only had data from two flybys from the Galileo spacecraft, years ago. Now there’s a third load of data. “It’s a huge, giant leap,” Bolton said.
What comes next, besides more image releases, will be observations from Juno’s microwave radiometer, an instrument that can penetrate Europa’s thick ice. What’s down there? There could be relatively warmer regions harboring cavities full of water, noted Bolton.
“Is there life elsewhere?”
“I suspect if there’s water it’ll stick out like a sore thumb to us,” he said.
The question that looms large is whether any life might dwell in this water, or in the seas sloshing under the ice. We don’t know. We’re far from any answers. But that’s one of the enticing elements of exploration.
“One of the goals of exploring the solar system and universe is to see if we’re alone,” Bolton told Mashable. “Is there life elsewhere?”
This story will be updated with more Europa images as they’re released.