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MXPlank Science-Casts News Letter - 2021-03-03




Spacecraft discovers thousands of doomed comets


The ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory has discovered more than 3000 doomed comets that have passed close to the sun.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, better known as "SOHO", is a joint project of the European Space Agency, or ESA, and NASA. Orbiting the sun at 1.5 million km, or 932,000 miles from Earth, the distant observatory has just discovered its 3000th comet-more than any other spacecraft or astronomer. And, just about all of SOHO's comets have been destroyed.

"They just disintegrate every time we observe one," said Karl Battams, a solar scientist at the Naval Research Labs in Washington, D.C., who has been in charge of running the SOHO comet-sighting website since 2003. "SOHO sees comets that pass very close to the sun-and they just can't stand the intense sunlight."

The overwhelming majority of SOHO's comet discoveries belong to the Kreutz family. Kreutz sungrazers are fragments from the breakup of a single giant comet thousands of years ago. They get their name from 19th century German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz, who studied them in detail. On average, a new member of the Kreutz family is discovered every three days. Unfortunately for these small comets, their orbits swoop perilously close to the sun.

There's only one Kreutz comet that made it around the sun – Comet Lovejoy. And we are pretty confident it fell apart a couple of weeks afterwards

Although SOHO's comets are rapidly destroyed, they nevertheless have great scientific value. For instance, the comets' tails are buffeted and guided by the sun's magnetic fields. Watching how the tails bend and swing can tell researchers a great deal about the sun's magnetic field.

Prior to the launch of SOHO in 1995, only a dozen or so comets had ever even been discovered from space, while some 900 had been discovered from the ground since 1761. SOHO has turned the tables on these figures, making itself the greatest comet hunter of all time.

But SOHO hasn't reached this lofty perch alone. The spacecraft relies on people who sift through its data. Anyone can help because SOHO's images are freely available online in real time. Many volunteer amateur astronomers scan the data on a daily basis for signs of a new comet. The result: 95% of SOHO comets have been found by citizen scientists.

Whenever someone spots a comet, they report it to Battams. He goes over the imagery to confirm the sighting and then submits it to the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which gives it an official name.

And the name is…you guessed it. "SOHO."

While comets spotted from the ground are named after the person who first discovered them, comets first observed by a space-based telescope are named after the spacecraft. The 3000th comet discovered was named "SOHO-3000."

Naturally, it has already been destroyed. SOHO doesn't mind though. The Greatest Comet Hunter Ever has already moved on to the next sungrazer.

"SOHO-4000," anyone?










Close Encounter with Enceladus


NASA's Cassini Spacecraft is about to make a daring plunge through one of the plumes emerging from Saturn's moon Enceladus.


Enceladus boasts an icy, ostensibly barren landscape riddled with deep canyons, dubbed tiger stripes. Underneath its icy exterior churns a global ocean, heated in part by tidal forces from Saturn and another moon, Dione, with seafloor vents expelling water at at least 194 degrees Fahrenheit. Plumes of water vapor and icy particles jettison from its surface in geyser-like spouts, hinting that there is much more to this snowy moonscape than meets the eye.

Cassini will be soaring through the jets located at the moon's south pole, only 30 miles above the surface.

Although the October 28th flyby won't be the closest we've ever been to Enceladus, it is the closest flyby over the south pole and through the plume. We'll be exploring in situ a region of the plume that Cassini has never sampled before.

So what causes these plumes, and why are they so important? Enceladus' vast, subterranean oceans may be fizzy and full of gas. When the gas and icy particles rise to the surface, they are expelled in plumes shooting from the tiger stripes. The process is similar to shaking up a bottle of soda; the gas has nowhere to go but up and out.

However, the plumes are more than just gas and water: samples show that they also contain many of the building blocks essential to Earth-like life. This lends itself to the exciting possibility that organisms similar to those that thrive in our own deep oceans near volcanic vents exuding carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide might exist on Eceladus. Although it is still too early to know exactly how complex potential Enceladus' lifeforms could be, scientists speculate that at the very least microbial life is a real possibility.

In the future, a different spacecraft may journey across the solar system to visit icy Enceladus. This spacecraft, unlike Cassini, could be designed to land on Enceladus' surface, near one of its tiger stripes. Such a lander would be able to take samples more directly, bypassing the plume altogether.

Ideally, it could take samples from the edge of one of the tiger stripes, speculates Spilker. This would ensure that any microbes being expelled from Enceladus' interior would be more plentiful and easier to collect.

Until then, flybys are the best we can do. And the next one should be very good indeed. Tune in on Oct. 28th!










Space-Time Vortex Around The Earth


MXPlank shows the results of an epic physics experiment which confirms the reality of a space-time vortex around our planet.

Is Earth in a vortex of space-time?

A Stanford physics experiment called Gravity Probe B (GP-B) recently finished a year of gathering science data in Earth orbit. The results, which will take another year to analyze, should reveal the shape of space-time around Earth--and, possibly, the vortex.

Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." The tremendous mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous lines of the dimple.

If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary. Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple, slightly, pulling it around into a 4-dimensional swirl. This is what GP-B went to space to check

The idea behind the experiment is simple:

Put a spinning gyroscope into orbit around the Earth, with the spin axis pointed toward some distant star as a fixed reference point. Free from external forces, the gyroscope's axis should continue pointing at the star--forever. But if space is twisted, the direction of the gyroscope's axis should drift over time. By noting this change in direction relative to the star, the twists of space-time could be measured.

In practice, the experiment is tremendously difficult.

The four gyroscopes in GP-B are the most perfect spheres ever made by humans. These ping pong-sized balls of fused quartz and silicon are 1.5 inches across and never vary from a perfect sphere by more than 40 atomic layers. If the gyroscopes weren't so spherical, their spin axes would wobble even without the effects of relativity.

According to calculations, the twisted space-time around Earth should cause the axes of the gyros to drift merely 0.041 arcseconds over a year. An arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree. To measure this angle reasonably well, GP-B needed a fantastic precision of 0.0005 arcseconds. It's like measuring the thickness of a sheet of paper held edge-on 100 miles away.

GP-B researchers invented whole new technologies to make this possible. They developed a "drag free" satellite that could brush against the outer layers of Earth's atmosphere without disturbing the gyros. They figured out how to keep Earth's penetrating magnetic field out of the spacecraft. And they concocted a device to measure the spin of a gyro--without touching the gyro.

Pulling off the experiment was an exceptional challenge. A lot of time and money was on the line, but the GP-B scientists appear to have done it.

"There were not any major surprises" in the experiment's performance, says physics professor Francis Everitt, the Principal Investigator for GP-B at Stanford University. Now that data-taking is complete, he says the mood among the GP-B scientists is "a lot of enthusiasm, and a realization also that a lot of grinding hard work is ahead of us."

A careful, thorough analysis of the data is underway. The scientists will do it in three stages, Everitt explains. First, they will look at the data from each day of the year-long experiment, checking for irregularities. Next they'll break the data into roughly month-long chunks, and finally they'll look at the whole year. By doing it this way, the scientists should be able to find any problems that a more simple analysis might miss.

Eventually scientists around the world will scrutinize the data. Says Everitt, "we want our sternest critics to be us."

The stakes are high. If they detect the vortex, precisely as expected, it simply means that Einstein was right, again. But what if they don't? There might be a flaw in Einstein's theory, a tiny discrepancy that heralds a revolution in physics.

First, though, there are a lot of data to analyze. Stay tuned.










Astrophysics Big Questions About Small Worlds


Small Worlds hold keys to questions about our solar system and the origin of life on Earth.


Scientists who study the solar system tend to ask big questions: How was our solar system formed? Where did the building blocks of life come from? What hazards from above threaten life on our planet? To find answers, theyre looking more and more at small worlds.

What are small worlds? Asteroids for sure. Comets too. Also the many small satellites or moons that orbit large planets as well as the icy worlds at the distance of Pluto and beyond. Some have combined, only to be broken apart later by collisions and tidal forces. Others have gone largely untouched since the dawn of the solar system. Some carry water and organic compounds, others are almost entirely composed of metal. And all hold keys to questions about our solar system and the origin of life on Earth.

Water is key to life as we know it. Learning where water is found in our solar system provides pieces to the puzzle of understanding the origins of life. New Horizons recently surprised us by discovering a large abundance of water ice at Pluto. More surprises are in store, as New Horizons transmits the data from its January 1, 2019 flyby of the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 back to Earth!

Small worlds can be found in a wide range of locations across the solar system, from the inner solar system all the way out to the Kuiper Belt. When they are studied together, these remnants of the early solar system can help tell the story of solar system formation.

Dawn recently completed a mission to the Main Asteroid Belt, visiting the dwarf planet Ceres and the Belts largest asteroid, Vesta. OSIRIS-REx has arrived at Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid about 1650 feet (500 m) across, and will return to Earth in 2023 with a sample so scientists can begin to understand Bennus origin and history. The Lucy mission will be traveling to six trojan asteroids, trapped in the orbit of Jupiter. These objects are the only remaining unexplored population of small worlds in the solar system. The Psyche mission will be visiting a metal object in the Main Asteroid Belt that could be the remnant core of a proto-planet similar in size to Vesta!

While those missions travel to their individual targets, NEOWISE, a repurposed space telescope in low-Earth orbit, has made infrared measurements of hundreds of near-Earth objects and tens of thousands of other small worlds in the solar system. These diverse worlds offer insights into how our solar system formed and evolved.

This is not your grandparents solar system and things are not as orderly as we once believed.

The data weve gleaned from these objects so far have changed the way we think about the origin of the planets. For example, the small worlds in the Kuiper Belt are leading us to think that Uranus and Neptune formed much closer to the Sun than where they reside now, then gradually moved to their current orbits.

The biggest misperception about small worlds? Their distance to each other. In the movies, they always show an asteroid belt with millions of rocks almost touching each other, whereas in reality there is much more empty space. You have to travel hundreds of thousands of miles to get from one asteroid to another.

Yet scientists are also looking closer to home. Determining the orbits and physical characteristics of objects that might impact Earth is critical to understanding the consequences of any such impact; and responding to an actual impact threat, if one is ever discovered. knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth. But, to prepare for that scenario is developing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART mission as the first demonstration of the kinetic impact technique that could be used to change the motion of a hazardous asteroid away from Earth.