Alien living beings on Pluto

 

Pluto may contain a subsurface ocean warm enough to host life, according to English physicist Brian Cox (who also said that humans could be the only complex life in our galaxy). Cox believes the tell-tale ooze of glaciers on Pluto’s surface hints at the possibility of a subterranean sea warm enough to host organic chemistry. “New Horizons probe showed that there may be a subsurface ocean on Pluto which means - if our understanding of life on Earth is even slightly correct- that you could have living things there,” Cox told ‘The Times’

The New Horizons spacecraft completed a three billion mile journey across the Solar System and performed a flyby of Pluto in July. The spacecraft captured detailed images and other data of Pluto and also of its moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. It is unlikely that New Horizons would be able to tell for certain whether warm water exists in the dwarf planet. Cox said that the most immediate prospect for finding evidence of life was on the moons of other planets closer to home. “It’s not as accessible, unfortunately, as Europa [a satellite of Jupiter] or some of Saturn’s moons. Titan looks as though it’s got a subsurface ocean now, and Enceladus throws liquid into space, so you can fly through that and see if it’s got organics in it,” he said. Cox also said it was plausible that humans could be the only complex life in our galaxy. The biological “bottlenecks” on the way to multi-cellular organisms are so difficult to squeeze through that only a tiny fraction of the planets where life emerges will be home to anything more than the simplest biology, he said. Cox added that science is telling us now that “complex life is probably rare.” 

Source:The Hindu

NASA to send robotic mission to Europa

NASA is planning to send a daring robotic mission by 2025 to Jupiter’s watery moon Europa — one of the best bets for alien life beyond Earth in our solar system.

The American space agency has set aside $15 million in its 2015 budget proposal to start planning a mission to Europa.

NASA’s chief financial officer, Elizabeth Robinson, was quoted by The Times as saying that the Europa mission would be launched in the mid-2020s.

Laurie Leshin, astronomer at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, said it would be “a daring mission to an extremely compelling object in our solar system.”

It is the first time the White House has mentioned a Europa mission in its budget, according to Wired.com.

“Clearly this is a statement by NASA that they recognise the priority and excitement of Europa exploration,” commented geologist Robert Pappalardo from NASA’s Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Europa is one of the solar system’s most mysterious moons. There may be a vast ocean beneath Europa’s icy crust, with more water in it than exists on all of Earth.

A little bit of that water may be erupting from geysers near the Europa’s south pole, sending plumes 200 kilometres into the air, a recent study has found.

Scientists can send a spacecraft flying through these jets in order to sample their composition.

“I would not be overly optimistic until I see the words, ‘We want to go to Europa’,” from the administration, said planetary scientist Alyssa Rhoden of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center.

Robinson said NASA will look at many competing ideas for a Europa mission, so the agency does not yet know how big or how much it will cost.

Meteor strike in Russia

The meteor which closely missed the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Friday is likely to go down in history as the largest celestial body to have hit the Earth over the past hundred years.

NASA scientists said the object was a tiny asteroid that released 300 to 500 kilotons of energy when it exploded, which is roughly equivalent to 20 atomic bombs of the type dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This would make the Chelyabinsk meteor the largest since 1908 when a meteor hit Tunguska in Siberia, levelling an estimated 80 million trees. The energy of the Tunguska blast is estimated to have been up to 50 megatons.

Scientists believe the Chelyabinsk meteor was about 17 metres across and weighed 10,000 tons. Shock waves from its explosion over Chelyabinsk wounded 1,200 people and shattered doors and windows in 3,724 apartment houses, 671 schools and 235 hospitals and outpatient clinics. What saved the city was that the explosion occurred 30 to 50 km above the ground.

Chelyabinsk governor Mikhail Yurevich said it was a very close brush for the region with a population of 3.5 million people.

It was the biggest celestial body ever observed on its flight through the atmosphere and there was a good chance of finding its fragments before they get contaminated by exposure to the elements.

Divers on Saturday searched the bottom of frozen Lake Chebarkul about 80 km from Chelyubinsk where a chunk of the meteor is believed to have plunged, but found nothing.

Scientists said the Chelyabinsk meteor's close miss should serve a wake-up call for the international community to set up a system for monitoring meteors of similar size and providing advance warnings to the population.

“Today we can spot about 10 percent of such objects as the Chelyabinsk meteor in the solar system,” said Dr. Malkov. “Ninety percent go undetected and some of them may crush on Earth any time.”

Politicians backed calls for greater international effort to combat cosmic threats.

“Instead of building a European missile defence system, the United States should join us and China in creating the AADS – the Anti-Asteroid Defence System,” said Alexei Pushkov, head of the International Committee of the State Dume, the lower house of the Russian Parliament.

 NASA, 2012 DA14, asteroid

Water in Mars regions have rudimentary life

Patches of Mars sub-surface could contain water and sustain a rudimentary form of life, such as martian microbes.“Our models tell us that if there is water present in the Martian sub-surface, then it could be habitable,” said doctoral student Eriita Jones from the Planetary Science Institute of the Australian National University.“We know that there is a hot, deep biosphere on Earth that extends to around five kilometres. If there is a hot deep biosphere on Mars, our modelling shows that it could extend to around 30 kilometres,” study co-author Charley Lineweaver added.The same scientists had modelled the earth earlier and identified water that was inhabited and water that was not, the Astrobiology Journal reported.

In this research, they applied the same technique to Mars and found that a large fraction of the Martian sub-surface could be harbouring habitable water, according to a university statement.

“We found that about three per cent of the volume of present-day Mars has the potential to be habitable to terrestrial-like life. This is compared to only about one per cent of the volume of the Earth being inhabited,” said Lineweaver.“Our conclusion is that the best way to find water — or potentially microbes — on Mars is to dig. Sadly, NASA’s Curiosity Rover, which is scheduled to land on Mars in August, has a limited capacity to scratch the surface to 10 or 20 centimetres,” he added

                                                                                                                             source:The Hindu

Star Explosion Leaves Behind a Rose like cloud in space

About 3,700 years ago, people on Earth would have seen a brand-new bright star in the sky. It slowly dimmed out of sight and was eventually forgotten, until modern astronomers later found its remains, called Puppis A. In this new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), Puppis A looks less like the remains of a supernova explosion and more like a red rose.
Puppis A (pronounced PUP-pis) was formed when a massive star ended its life in a supernova, the most brilliant and powerful form of an explosion in the known universe. The expanding shock waves from that explosion are heating up the dust and gas clouds surrounding the supernova, causing them to glow and appear red in this infrared view. While much of the material from that original star was violently thrown out into space, some of it remained in an incredibly dense object called a neutron star. This particular neutron star (too faint to be seen in this image) is moving inexplicably fast: over 3 million miles per hour! Astronomers are perplexed over its absurd speed, and have nicknamed the object the "Cosmic Cannonball."
Some of the green-colored gas and dust in the image is from yet another ancient supernova -- the Vela supernova remnant. That explosion happened around 12,000 years ago and was four times closer to us than Puppis A.
The colors in this image represent different wavelengths of infrared light that humans can't see with their eyes.
JPL manages and operates the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
                                                                                                                            source:NASA

NASA Mars Rover Finds Mineral Vein Deposited by Water

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found bright veins of a mineral, apparently gypsum, deposited by water. Analysis of the vein will help improve understanding of the history of wet environments on Mars.
"This tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through underground fractures in the rock," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for Opportunity. "This stuff is a fairly pure chemical deposit that formed in place right where we see it. That can't be said for other gypsum seen on Mars or for other water-related minerals Opportunity has found. It's not uncommon on Earth, but on Mars, it's the kind of thing that makes geologists jump out of their chairs."
The latest findings by Opportunity were presented Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union's conference in San Francisco..
Last month, researchers used the Microscopic Imager and Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer on the rover's arm and multiple filters of the Panoramic Camera on the rover's mast to examine the vein, which is informally named "Homestake." The spectrometer identified plentiful calcium and sulfur, in a ratio pointing to relatively pure calcium sulfate.
Calcium sulfate can exist in many forms, varying by how much water is bound into the minerals' crystalline structure. The multi-filter data from the camera suggest gypsum, a hydrated calcium sulfate. On Earth, gypsum is used for making drywall and plaster of Paris. Observations from orbit had detected gypsum on Mars previously. A dune field of windblown gypsum on far northern Mars resembles the glistening gypsum dunes in White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.
Throughout Opportunity's long traverse across Mars' Meridiani plain, the rover has driven over bedrock composed of magnesium, iron and calcium sulfate minerals that also indicate a wet environment billions of years ago. The highly concentrated calcium sulfate at Homestake could have been produced in conditions more neutral than the harshly acidic conditions indicated by the other sulfate deposits observed by Opportunity.
Homestake and similar-looking veins appear in a zone where the sulfate-rich sedimentary bedrock of the plains meets older, volcanic bedrock exposed at the rim of Endeavour. That location may offer a clue about their origin.
                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                      source:NASA

NEW EARTH LIKE PLANT FOUND

                                                                  

NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the "habitable zone," the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. The newly confirmed planet, Kepler-22b, is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don't yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets. Previous research hinted at the existence of near-Earth-size planets in habitable zones, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Two other small planets orbiting stars smaller and cooler than our sun recently were confirmed on the very edges of the habitable zone, with orbits more closely resembling those of Venus and Mars. "This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Kepler's results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA's science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe." Kepler discovers planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets that cross in front, or "transit," the stars. Kepler requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a planet.Kepler-22b is located 600 light-years away. While the planet is larger than Earth, its orbit of 290 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our world. The planet's host star belongs to the same class as our sun, called G-type, although it is slightly smaller and cooler.
                                                                                                                   source:NASA

Manned spacecraft docks to the space station

A spacecraft carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts on Wednesday successfully docked to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz TMA-22 with NASA astronaut Dan Burbank and Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin onboard docked to the orbiting station several minutes ahead of schedule Moscow time. The three blasted off from the Russia-leased cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday.

The 39-year-old Shkaplerov and 42-year-old Ivanishin are making their first flights into space. Burbank, 50, who will take over command of the space station, is a veteran of 12-day shuttle missions in 2000 and 2006. The three men are to remain aboard the space station until March.

The mission’s launch had been delayed for two months because of the crash of an unmanned Progress cargo ship in August. That failed launch raised doubts about future missions to the station, because the rocket the crashed ship used had the same upper stage as the booster rockets carrying Soyuz ships to orbit. The delay cut the mission onboard to three people.

American Michael Fossum, Russian Sergey Volkov and Japanese Satoshi Furukawa have been onboard since June and are due to return to Earth next week. Another launch next month will take the station back to its normal six-person crew mode.

William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said in a televised news briefing shortly after the docking that “the Russian team did the tremendous job of getting the launch and the docking ready.”

The three men are expected to move from their ship to the space station about two hours after the docking.

                                                                                                                                  Source:The Hindu

NASA TO LAUNCH NEW MARS ROVER

 On the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida is a spacecraft, the Mars Science Laboratory, that is scheduled to lift off on Friday/Saturday and reach Mars next August. It will deliver an S.U.V.-size rover named “Curiosity” that carries an instrument that can detect methane in the air, and if it does, it will unleash new excitement about the prospect of life on Mars.
                                                                                                                                    Source:The Hindu