Quantumaniac

Seeing New-England’s Storm ‘Nemo’ from Space

The gigantic snowstorm headed for New England is predicted to be a mean one that will dump feet of snow on an area from New York to Maine. But the ominous picture the National Weather Service is painting isn’t as frightening as the view from space.

The massive storm can be seen taking shape in this image, taken by NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite today at 9:01 ET, as a western front that stretches from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico prepares to merge with a curling low-pressure system over the Atlantic Ocean off the shore of Virginia.

Sources: Wired Science, NOAA

The Arms of M106 

The spiral arms of bright galaxy M106 sprawl through this remarkable multiframe portrait, composed of data from ground- and space-based telescopes. Also known as NGC 4258, M106 can be found toward the northern constellation Canes Venatici. The well-measured distance to M106 is 23.5 million light-years, making this cosmic scene about 80,000 light-years across. Typical in grand spiral galaxies, dark dust lanes, youthful blue star clusters, and pinkish star forming regions trace spiral arms that converge on the bright nucleus of older yellowish stars. But this detailed composite reveals hints of two anomalous arms that don’t align with the more familiar tracers. Seen here in red hues, sweeping filaments of glowing hydrogen gas seem to rise from the central region of M106, evidence of energetic jets of material blasting into the galaxy’s disk. The jets are likely powered by matter falling into a massive central black hole.

Credit: Image Data - Hubble Legacy Archive, Robert Gendler, Jay GaBany, Processing - Robert Gendler, NASA

3-D Printers Could Make Food for Astronauts

Several decades from now, an astronaut in a Mars colony might feel a bit hungry. Rather than reach for a vacuum-sealed food packet or cook up some simple greenhouse vegetables in a tiny kitchen, the astronaut would visit a microwave-sized box, punch a few settings, and receive a delicious and nutritious meal tailored to his or her exact tastes.

This is the promise of the rapidly maturing field of 3-D food printing, an offshoot of the revolution that uses machines to build bespoke items out of metal, plastic, and even living cells. Sooner than you think, 3-D printed designer meals may be coming to a rocketship, or a restaurant, near you.

“Right now, astronauts on the space station are eating the same seven days of food on rotations of two or three weeks,” said astronautical engineer Michelle Terfansky, who studied the potential and challenges of making 3-D printed food in space for a master’s thesis at the University of Southern California.

With 3-D printers coming of age, engineers are starting to expand the possible list of materials they might work with. The Fab@Home team at Cornell University has developed gel-like substances called hydrocolloids that can be extruded and built up into different shapes. By mixing in flavoring agents, they can produce a range of tastes and textures.

A 3-D printer could mix vitamins and amino acids into a meal to provide nutrients and boost productivity. There are limitations to the types of fresh foods that can be grown in space – NASA says some of the best crops for a Mars mission are lettuce, carrots, and tomatoes. With that you could make a salad, but a 3-D printer could manufacture croutons or protein-dense supplements. The device could take up less space than a supply of packets of food and, because each item is custom built, would help cut down on waste.

But 3-D food printing systems still have a long way to go, with most of the current limitations involving the printer’s extruding system. Some items, like frosting or processed cheese, are easy to make printable. A chocolate treat, for instance, is created using a syringe filled with melted chocolate to build up a shape specified by a computer layer by layer. But other materials – fruits, vegetables, and meats – are much more of a challenge. 

In the earliest tests of the hydrocolloid 3-D food printer, the Cornell team produced different fake items — bananas, mushrooms, mozzarella – all with the appropriate texture and flavor. Because no one wants to eat something that looks and tastes bad, Terfansky said the best thing would be to focus on making sure things are delicious and then improving the visual aesthetics.

Within five to 10 years, she said the technology might get to the point where a single printer could produce lots of different food items that are both flavorful and look like what they’re supposed to be. Terfansky sees a day further in the future when most home kitchens include a 3-D printer simple enough for a child to go up and press the “hamburger” button in order to receive a meal. Such plans may seem like the food machine from The Jetsons but other researchers say they’re not out of the realm of possibility.

Source: Wired Science

Trifid Nebula

Clouds of glowing gas mingle with dust lanes in the Trifid Nebula, a star forming region toward the constellation of the Archer (Sagittarius). In the center, the three prominent dust lanes that give the Trifid its name all come together. Mountains of opaque dust appear on the right, while other dark filaments of dust are visible threaded throughout the nebula. A single massive star visible near the center causes much of the Trifid’s glow.

The Trifid, also known as M20, is only about 300,000 years old, making it among the youngest emission nebulae known. The nebula lies about 9,000 light years away and the part pictured here spans about 10 light years.

Source: APOD

The Pale Blue Dot

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, astronomer Carl Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the above photograph:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Gorgeous New NASA Photos Of Saturn’s Rings and Clouds

NASA has unveiled amazing new views of the planet Saturnshowcasing the ringed wonder’s moons, rings and turbulent atmosphere as seen by the Cassini spacecraft.

The first photo, which NASA released on Christmas Eve (Dec. 24), clearly shows Saturn’s south pole and distinctive rings. But the image also holds a few surprises.

The shadow of Saturn’s moon Mimas appears in the photo as a small, oblique dark spot slightly to the left and above the planet’s south pole. Mimas is perhaps best known for a huge crater that dominates one of its hemispheres, leading some “Star Wars” fans to compare its look to the “Death Star.”

Cassini also captured Janus, another of the more than 60 known moons of Saturn, in the top left section of the image. The small satellite is difficult to spot, but appears as a tiny white dot just over the planet’s north pole. While NASA released the photo of Saturn, Mimas and Janus this week, Cassini actually snapped the image in August. Since then, mission scientists processed and polished the image to highlight its features. 

A second Saturn photo, a raw, unprocessed view released Wednesday (Dec. 26), shows Saturn’s turbulent surface in extreme detail. Violent storms churning among Saturn’s cloud tops appear as delicate whorls and swirls.

Both of the new Saturn photos were taken with Cassini’s wide-angle camera, but they represent two different ways NASA handles space images. The first photo of Saturn, Janus and Mimas was refined to bring out the most interesting aspects of the photos. For example, Janus was barely visible in the original, raw image, so image specialists opted to brighten the small moon in the final, refined image.

The second image is part of a larger database of raw images that NASA releases online soon after they are sent to Earth by Cassini. Like the first photo, this somewhat foggy depiction of Saturn’s surface will eventually be treated to bring out its most stunning aspects.

The Cassini spacecraft has logged more than 3.8 billion miles (6.1 billion km) since its launch with the Huygens lander in 1997. Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004 and dropped European-built Huygens onto the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. The Cassini- Huygens mission is a joint project of NASA, the Italian Space Agency and the European Space Agency.

During its time in space, Cassini has taken more than 300,000 images of the Saturn and its moons. The spacecraft is currently in an extended phase of its mission that runs through 2017.

(Source: Yahoo!)

Curiosity Rover Prepares to Drill Into Rocks That May Have Once Been Wet

NASA’s Curiosity rover has explored a new area on Mars called Yellowknife Bay, which shows plenty of evidence of flowing water. The rover is preparing to drill into a rock nicknamed “John Klein” in the location in the next couple weeks, investigating its composition and searching for organics. This will be the first time that engineers have drilled into the surface of another planet.

Scientists already know that Curiosity’s explorations have taken it to a place that was basically an ancient riverbed. Now they are uncovering the complex geologic history of the area and have stumbled across many interesting features.

“The scientists have been let into the candy store,” said engineer Richard Cook, project manager for Curiosity, during a NASA teleconference on Jan. 15.

For the last few weeks, the rover has been moving from the plateau it landed on down a slope into a depression. As it descended, it passed through layers of rock that are increasingly older, taking it backwards into the planet’s history. Geologists are finding a lot of different rock types, indicating that many different geologic processes took place here over time.

Some of the minerals are sedimentary, suggesting that flowing water moved small grains around and deposited them, and other evidence suggests water moved through the rocks after they had formed. Tiny spherical concretions scattered through the rock were likely formed when water percolated through rock pores and minerals precipitated out. Other samples are cracked and filled with veins of material such as calcium sulfate, that were also formed when water percolated through the cracks and deposited the mineral.

“Basically these rocks were saturated with water,” said geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, Curiosity’s project scientist, who added that these rocks indicate the most complex history of water that researchers have yet seen on Mars.

Curiosity brushed some of these rocks to remove their dust covering and then peered at them close-up with its high-resolution Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera. The rocks are sandstones containing larger grains up to 2 mm long surrounded by silt grains that are “finer than powdered sugar but coarser than sugar used to make icing,” said geologist R. Aileen Yingst of the Planetary Science Institute, a scientist on the MAHLI team.

Many of the grains are rounded, suggesting they were knocked about and worn down somehow. Because the grains are too large to have been carried by wind, they were most likely transported by water flowing at least 1 meter per second (2.2 mph). All these investigations suggest if you could go deep into Mars’ past and stand at the same spot as the rover, you’d probably see a river of flowing water with small underwater dunes along the riverbed.

The next step for Curiosity is to drill 5 centimeter holes into some of these rocks and veins to definitively determine their composition. Grotzinger said that the team will search for aqueous minerals, isotope ratios that could indicate the composition of Mars’ atmosphere in the past, and possibly organic material.

The drilling will probably take place within two weeks, though NASA engineers are still unsure of the exact date. The procedure will be “the most significant engineering thing we’ve done since landing,” said Cook, and will require several trial runs, equipment warm-ups, and drilling a couple test holes to make sure everything works. The team wants to take things as slowly as possible to correct for any problems that may arise, such as potential electrical shorts and excessive shaking of the rover.

Frozen Water and Organic Material Discovered on Mercury

For the first time, scientists have confirmed that the planet Mercury holds at least 100 billion tons of water ice as well as organic material in permanently shadowed craters at its north pole.

The findings come from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, which has been in orbit around the solar system’s smallest and innermost planet since 2011. Researchers have suspected that ice could exist in such craters since 1992, when Earth-based radar measurements found bright areas at the planet’s polar regions. Craters in this area cast long shadows, which prevent any sunlight from reaching their floors.

Though alternative explanations had been put forward to account for the radar-bright areas, MESSENGER has provided convincing evidence for water ice on the planet closest to our sun, where surface temperatures can sometimes reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit. The results appeared in three studies Nov. 29 in Science.

MESSENGER was able to detect water ice because it carries a neutron spectrometer that looks at energetic neutrons bouncing off Mercury’s surface. Water gives off a characteristic neutron signature. The spacecraft measured the area around Mercury’s north pole and found this characteristic signature, suggesting that between 100 billion and 1 trillion tons of water ice was present somewhere in the area. But the neutron spectrometer has fairly low resolution, on the order of hundreds of miles, so it can’t definitively say if this water is inside the craters. (If it were outside, daytime temperatures would have boiled the water away.)

Image: The topographic height of craters and surface features at Mercury’s north pole (top) and a model of the maximum amount of sunlight received in this area (bottom). Neumann et al, Science, 10.1126/science.1229764

Because they contain no light, MESSENGER’s cameras can’t see right inside the permanently shadowed regions. But the spacecraft carries a useful workaround tool. To map its height above the surface, the probe uses an altimeter that shoots a 10-nanosecond infrared laser pulse at the ground and intercepts the returning beam.

“We can measure the energy that comes back from the laser,” said planetary scientist Gregory Neumann of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, and lead author on one of the Science studies. Though the number of photons coming back is slight, “we could expect to see glints of brightness from surface water ice.”

Early results from MESSENGER presented a puzzle. Not only were there no bright spots in the permanently shadowed craters where radar measurements suggested ice, the surface was actually much darker than Mercury’s average color. “We were really surprised by this,” said Neumann.

The spacecraft continued to search, examining more and more craters. Finally, the laser spotted some dazzling crater floors that were two to four times brighter than the rest of Mercury’s surface. This was finally good evidence for the long-sought water ice. By modeling the temperature in and around different craters, scientists were able to determine the northernmost craters stayed cold enough over millions of years to hold onto water ice.

But what about the strange dark craters? Radar measurements suggested ice, but MESSENGER wasn’t confirming the result. The temperature models showed that these craters corresponded exactly to regions that would sometimes receive a small amount of scattered sunlight. This itsy bit of energy would heat the frozen water’s surface enough to sublimate it away. Dark organic compounds dissolved in the ice got left behind as residue and would slowly form a black cover, about 8 to 11 inches thick, which protected any remaining ice from getting vaporized by random sunbeams.

The organic material is likely made of hydrocarbons like methane and ethane, commonly found in comets and asteroids. “At room temperature it would be kind of gooey stuff, to use the technical term,” said planetary scientist Sean Solomon of Columbia University, who leads the MESSENGER team. Because the layer is relatively thin, it’s invisible to radar.

The MESSENGER team now thinks they have a good story to explain how these polar cold traps work. Every once in a while, a comet or asteroid hits Mercury and gets annihilated. The vaporized material either floats out into space or gets blasted away by the sun but any that finds its way into a permanently shadowed region will settle down. Molecule by molecule, water and other compounds build up inside the craters. Those that never see a ray of sunlight contain mostly clean water ice. But if even a tiny amount of light intrudes, it may heat up the water and cause it to recede below a layer of organic material.

“These look like really good results, and I think they are very convincing,” said planetary scientist Johannes Benkhoff from the Institute of Planetary Research in Germany, who is the lead scientist on the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo mission, which is expected to orbit Mercury in 2022. MESSENGER will provide many follow-up opportunities for this later mission, which will have its own neutron spectrometer to map the water ice regions with greater resolution.

In addition to being an astounding result, the finding can help scientists better understand the history of Earth. Mercury is a terrestrial planet like our own and the ice provides evidence for geologically recent delivery of water and carbon-rich material to the inner solar system from comets and asteroids. This process very likely happened billions of years in the past, when the Earth first formed, creating our planet’s oceans and possibly seeding them with the material to produce life.

“There’s now this record on Mercury, a place where we least expected to find it, of this process,” said Solomon. “It gives us a window to understanding this delivery system.”