Asteroid Day is a global awareness campaign where people from around the world come together to learn about asteroids, the impact hazard they may pose, and what we can do to protect our planet, families, communities, and future generations from future asteroid impacts. Asteroid Day is held each year on the anniversary of the largest impact in recent history, the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia.
Leaders in the field and several scientific organizations are participating in the event. For example, the European Space Agency says Every day is Asteroid Day at ESA.
In February 2014, Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and famed guitarist for the rock band QUEEN, began working with Grigorij Richters, the director of a new film titled51 Degrees North, a fictional story of an asteroid impact on London and the resulting human condition. May composed the music for the film and suggested that Richters preview it at Starmus, an event organized by Dr. Garik Israelian and attended by esteemed astrophysicists, scientists and artists, including Dr. Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Rick Wakeman. The result was the beginning of discussions that would lead to the launch of Asteroid Day in 2015.
This image combines an image taken with Hubble Space Telescope in the optical (taken in spring 2014) and observations of its auroras in the ultraviolet, taken in 2016.
Astronomers are using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study auroras — stunning light shows in a planet’s atmosphere — on the poles of the largest planet in the Solar System, Jupiter. This observation programme is supported by measurements made by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, currently on its way to Jupiter.
This timelapse video of the vivid auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere was created using observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble is particularly suited to observing and studying the auroras on the biggest planet in the Solar System, as they are brightest in the ultraviolet. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Nichols
Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, is best known for its colourful storms, the most famous being the Great Red Spot. Now astronomers have focused on another beautiful feature of the planet, using the ultraviolet capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
The extraordinary vivid glows shown in the new observations are known as auroras[1]. They are created when high energy particles enter a planet’s atmosphere near its magnetic poles and collide with atoms of gas. As well as producing beautiful images, this programme aims to determine how various components of Jupiter’s auroras respond to different conditions in the solar wind, a stream of charged particles ejected from the Sun.
This timelapse video of the vivid auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere was created using observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble is particularly suited to observing and studying the auroras on the biggest planet in the Solar System, as they are brightest in the ultraviolet. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Nichols
This observation programme is perfectly timed as NASA’s Juno spacecraft is currently in the solar wind near Jupiter and will enter the orbit of the planet in early July 2016. While Hubble is observing and measuring the auroras on Jupiter, Juno is measuring the properties of the solar wind itself; a perfect collaboration between a telescope and a space probe [2].
“These auroras are very dramatic and among the most active I have ever seen”, says Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester, UK, and principal investigator of the study. “It almost seems as if Jupiter is throwing a firework party for the imminent arrival of Juno.”
To highlight changes Add Newin the auroras Hubble is observing Jupiter daily for around one month. Using this series of images it is possible for scientists to create videos that demonstrate the movement of the vivid auroras, which cover areas bigger than the Earth.
Not only are the auroras huge, they are also hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth. And, unlike those on Earth, they never cease. Whilst on Earth the most intense auroras are caused by solar storms — when charged particles rain down on the upper atmosphere, excite gases, and cause them to glow red, green and purple — Jupiter has an additional source for its auroras.
The strong magnetic field of the gas giant grabs charged particles from its surroundings. This includes not only the charged particles within the solar wind but also the particles thrown into space by its orbiting moon Io, known for its numerous and large volcanos.
The new observations and measurements made with Hubble and Juno will help to better understand how the Sun and other sources influence auroras. While the observations with Hubble are still ongoing and the analysis of the data will take several more months, the first images and videos are already available and show the auroras on Jupiter’s north pole in their full beauty.
Notes
[1] Jupiter’s auroras were first discovered by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979. A thin ring of light on Jupiter’s nightside looked like a stretched-out version of our own auroras on Earth. Only later on was it discovered that the auroras were best visible in the ultraviolet.
[2] This is not the first time astronomers have used Hubble to observe the auroras on Jupiter, nor is it the first time that Hubble has cooperated with space probes to do so. In 2000 the NASA/ESA Cassini spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter and scientists used this opportunity to gather data and images about the auroras simultaneously from Cassini and Hubble (heic0009). In 2007 Hubble obtained images in support of its sister NASA Mission New Horizons which used Jupiter’s gravity for a manoeuvre on its way to Pluto (opo0714a).
The brightest area on Ceres, located in the mysterious Occator Crater, has the highest concentration of carbonate minerals ever seen outside Earth, according to a new study from scientists on NASA’s Dawn mission. The study, published online in the journal Nature, is one of two new papers about the makeup of Ceres.
The center of Ceres’ mysterious Occator Crater is the brightest area on the dwarf planet. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/ASI/INAF › Full image and caption
“This is the first time we see this kind of material elsewhere in the solar system in such a large amount,” said Maria Cristina De Sanctis, lead author and principal investigator of Dawn’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer. De Sanctis is based at the National Institute of Astrophysics, Rome.
At about 80 million years old, Occator is considered a young crater. It is 57 miles (92 kilometers) wide, with a central pit about 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide. A dome structure at the center, covered in highly reflective material, has radial and concentric fractures on and around it.
De Sanctis’ study finds that the dominant mineral of this bright area is sodium carbonate, a kind of salt found on Earth in hydrothermal environments. This material appears to have come from inside Ceres, because an impacting asteroid could not have delivered it. The upwelling of this material suggests that temperatures inside Ceres are warmer than previously believed. Impact of an asteroid on Ceres may have helped bring this material up from below, but researchers think an internal process played a role as well.
More intriguingly, the results suggest that liquid water may have existed beneath the surface of Ceres in recent geological time. The salts could be remnants of an ocean, or localized bodies of water, that reached the surface and then froze millions of years ago.
“The minerals we have found at the Occator central bright area require alteration by water,” De Sanctis said. “Carbonates support the idea that Ceres had interior hydrothermal activity, which pushed these materials to the surface within Occator.”
The spacecraft’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer examines how various wavelengths of sunlight are reflected by the surface of Ceres. This allows scientists to identify minerals that are likely producing those signals. The new results come from the infrared mapping component, which examines Ceres in wavelengths of light too long for the eye to see.
The bright central spots near the center of Occator Crater are shown in enhanced color in this view from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Such views can be used to highlight subtle color differences on Ceres’ surface. Lower resolution color data have been overlaid onto a higher resolution view (see PIA20350) of the crater. The view was produced by combining the highest resolution images of Occator obtained in February 2016 (at image scales of 35 meters, or 115 feet, per pixel) with color images obtained in September 2015 (at image scales of 135 meters, or about 440 feet, per pixel). The three images used to produce the color were taken using spectral filters centered at 438, 550 and 965 nanometers (the latter being slightly beyond the range of human vision, in the near-infrared). The crater measures 57 miles (92 kilometers) across and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) deep. Dawn’s close-up view reveals a dome in a smooth-walled pit in the bright center of the crater. Numerous linear features and fractures crisscross the top and flanks of this dome.Last year, in a Nature study, De Sanctis’ team reported that the surface of Ceres contains ammoniated phyllosilicates, or clays containing ammonia. Because ammonia is abundant in the outer solar system, this finding introduced the idea that Ceres may have formed near the orbit of Neptune and migrated inward. Alternatively, Ceres may have formed closer to its current position between Mars and Jupiter, but with material accumulated from the outer solar system.
The new results also find ammonia-bearing salts — ammonium chloride and/or ammonium bicarbonate — in Occator Crater. The carbonate finding further reinforces Ceres’ connection with icy worlds in the outer solar system. Ammonia, in addition to sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate found at Occator, has been detected in the plumes of Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn known for its geysers erupting from fissures in its surface. Such materials make Ceres interesting for the study of astrobiology.
“We will need to research whether Ceres’ many other bright areas also contain these carbonates,” De Sanctis said.
A separate Nature study in 2015 by scientists with the Dawn framing camera team hypothesized that the bright areas contain a different kind of salt: magnesium sulfate. But the new findings suggest sodium carbonate is the more likely constituent.
“It’s amazing how much we have been able to learn about Ceres’ interior from Dawn’s observations of chemical and geophysical properties. We expect more such discoveries as we mine this treasure trove of data,” said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
Dawn science team members have also published a new study about the makeup of the outer layer of Ceres in Nature Geoscience, based on images from Dawn’s framing camera. This study, led by Michael Bland of the U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Arizona, finds that most of Ceres’ largest craters are more than 1 mile (2 kilometers) deep relative to surrounding terrain, meaning they have not deformed much over billions of years. These significant depths suggest that Ceres’ subsurface is no more than 40 percent ice by volume, and the rest may be a mixture of rock and low-density materials such as salts or chemical compounds called clathrates. The appearance of a few shallow craters suggests that there could be variations in ice and rock content in the subsurface.
Dawn’s mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of mission participants, visit: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission
More information about Dawn is available at the following sites:
Juno took this picture of Jupiter’s Moons on June 21:
NASA’s Juno spacecraft obtained this color view on June 21, 2016, at a distance of 6.8 million miles (10.9 million kilometers) from Jupiter. As Juno makes its initial approach, the giant planet’s four largest moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto — are visible, and the alternating light and dark bands of the planet’s clouds are just beginning to come into view. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS [Larger image]Here is a video overview of the project:
This video is about the spacecraft technology:
The spacecraft will spend two years on scientific studies including measurements of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, gravity, atmospheric composition, and more.
In preparation for the imminent arrival of NASA’s Juno spacecraft in July 2016, astronomers used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to obtain spectacular new infrared images of Jupiter using the VISIR instrument. They are part of a campaign to create high-resolution maps of the giant planet to inform the work to be undertaken by Juno over the following months, helping astronomers to better understand the gas giant. This false-colour image was created by selecting and combining the best images obtained from many short VISIR exposures at a wavelength of 5 micrometres.
False colour images generated from VLT observations in February and March 2016, showing two different faces of Jupiter. The bluer areas are cold and cloud-free, the orangey areas are warm and cloudy, more colourless bright regions are warm and cloud-free, and dark regions are cold and cloudy (such as the Great Red Spot and the prominent ovals). The wave pattern over the North Equatorial Band shows up in orange. This view was created from VLT/VISIR infrared images from February 2016 (left) and March 2016 (right). The orange images were obtained at 10.7 micrometres wavelength and highlight the different temperatures and presence of ammonia. The blue images at 8.6 micrometres highlight variations in cloud opacity.
1. Monday, June 27 , 2016: 2-3:30 PM PDT (5-6:30 PM EDT, 4-5:30 PM CDT): We welcome MARIA-VITTORIA “GIUGI” CARMINATI, ATTY, to discuss the Manfred Lachs Moot Court which this year focused on space debris, commercial spaceflight services and liability.
2. Tuesday, June 28 2016: 7-8:30 PM PDT (10-11:30 PM EDT, 9-10:30 PM CDT) BOB ZIMMERMAN is back with us. Don’t miss this program.
3. Friday, July 1, 2016: 2016; 9:30-11AM PDT; (12:30-2 PM EDT; 11:30 AM – 1 PM CDT) We welcome COURTNEY STADD for his commercial space perspectives and much more. You don’t want to miss this discussion.
4. Sunday, July 3, 2016: 12-1:30 PM PDT (3-4:30 PM EDT, 2-3:30 PM CDT):No show today due to the July 4 holiday weekend.
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