Category Astronomy

Naming planetary objects?

On August 23, India celebrated a technological triumph when Chandrayaan-3 landed near the Moon’s South Pole at 6:04 p.m. Since then, there has been a discussion on the naming of the landing spot, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi has termed Shiv Shakti.

Do you know how are planetary objects are usually named?

International Astronomical Union             

The International Astronomical Union (IAU), founded in 1919, is responsible for assigning names to celestial bodies and surface features on them. In the IAU, there are numerous Working Groups that suggest the names of astronomical objects and features.

In 1982, the United Nations, at its ‘Fourth Conference on the Standardisation of Geographical Names held in Geneva, recognised the role of the IAU by adopting its resolution on extraterrestrial feature names.

Key rules

The IAU has set some rules for naming planetary objects. Some of the most important rules are -the names should be simple, clear, and unambiguous; there should not be duplication of names; no names having political, military or religious significance may be used, except for names of political figures prior to the 19th Century; and if a name of a person is suggested, then he/she must have been deceased for at least three years, before a proposal may be submitted.

Process of naming

When the first images of the surface of a planet or satellite are obtained, themes for naming features are chosen and names of a few important features are proposed, usually by members of the appropriate IAU Working Group. However, there is no guarantee that the name will be accepted.

Names reviewed by an IAU Working Group are submitted by the group’s chairperson to the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN). After this, the members of the WGPSN vote on the names.

The names approved by the WGPSN members are considered as official IAU nomenclature and can be used on maps and in publications. The approved names are then entered into the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, and posted on the website of IAU.

Objections

If there are any objections to the proposed names, an application has to be sent to the IAU general secretary within three months from the time the name was placed on the website. The general secretary will make a recommendation to the WGPSN Chair as to whether or not the approved name(s) should be reconsidered.

 In 1966, the Outer Space Treaty was formed by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs to set rules for international space law. One of the key aspects of this treaty was that the outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all states without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.

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What is the mission of Helios 2?

On April 16-17, 1976, Helios-B made its closest approach to the sun, thereby setting a record for the closest flyby of the sun.

April is here and with it comes searing heat as the sun beats down heavily on most parts of India. You must be aware, however, that the sun, with its entire mass of glowing, boiling heat, is the source of all life on Earth. Our sun, in fact, influences how every object in the solar system is shaped and behaves.

Studying solar processes

This means that learning more about the sun and understanding it better has always been a priority. Apart from studying it from here on Earth, which is what we did for most of our history, we have also started sending spacecraft to explore its secrets. The Helios mission was one such mission, sending out a pair of probes into heliocentric orbit (an orbit around the sun) to study solar processes.

Following the success of the Pioneer probes, which formed a ring of solar weather stations along Earth’s orbit to measure solar wind and predict solar storms, the Helios mission was planned. While the Pioneer probes orbited within 0.8 AU (astronomical unit, mean distance between Earth and sun) of the sun, the Helios probes shattered that record within years.

A joint German-American deep-space mission to study solar-terrestrial relationships and many solar processes, it was NASA’s largest bilateral project up until then. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) paid around $180 million of the total $260 million cost and provided the spacecraft, while NASA provided the launch vehicles.

Named Helios-A and Helios-B and equipped with state-of-the-art thermal control systems, the pair of probes were renamed Helios 1 and Helios 2 after their launches. Launched late in 1974, Helios 1 passed within 47 million km (0.31 AU) of the sun at a speed of 2,38,000 km per hour on March 15, 1975. While this was clearly the closest any human-made object had ever been to the sun, the record was broken again in a little over a year by its twin probe.

Even though Helios-B was very similar to Helios-A, the second spacecraft had improvements in terms of system design in order to help it survive longer in the harsh conditions it was heading for. Launched early in 1976, Helios 2 was also put into heliocentric orbit like its twin.

Achieves perihelion

Helios 2, however, flew 3 million km closer to the sun when compared to Helios 1. On April 16-17, 1976, Helios 2 achieved its perihelion or closest approach to the sun at a distance of 0.29 AU or 43.432 million km. At that distance, Helios 2 took the record for the closest flyby of the sun, a record that it didn’t relinquish for over four decades. It also set a new speed record for a spacecraft in the process, reaching a maximum velocity of 68.6 km/s (2.46.960 km/h).

Helios 2’s position relative to the sun meant that it was exposed to 10% more heat or 20 degrees Celsius more heat when compared to Helios 1. In addition to providing information on solar plasma, solar wind, cosmic rays, and cosmic dust, Helios 2 also performed magnetic field and electrical field experiments.

Apart from studying these parameters about the sun and its environment, both Helios 1 and Helios 2 also had the opportunity to observe the dust and ion tails of at least three comets. While data from Helios 1 was received until late 1982, Helios 2’s downlink transmitter failed on March 3, 1980. No further usable data was received from Helios 2 and ground controllers shut down the spacecraft on January 7, 1981.

This was done to avoid any possible radio interference with other spacecraft in the future as both probes continue to orbit the sun.

Parker Solar Probe gets closer and faster

After enjoying its position for over 40 years, Helios 2’s records were finally broken by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. Launched on August 12, 2018 to study the sun in unprecedented detail, the probe became the first to “touch” the sun during its eighth flyby on April 28, 2021 when it swooped inside the sun’s outer atmosphere. Already holding both the distance and speed records, it is expected to further break them both during its 24 orbits of the sun over its seven-year lifespan. When it completed its 15th closest approach to the sun a month ago on March 17, it came within 8.5 million km of the sun’s surface.

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Why does the European Space Agency want to give the Moon its own time?

The European Space Agency announced that space organisations around the world are considering how best to keep time on the moon. The need is for an internationally accepted lunar time zone.

How do you keep track of time on the moon?  What is the lunar reference point? The moon needs to be given its own time zone, the European Space Agency announced recently. As the race to the moon begins and more and more lunar missions are getting deployed, it is become, pertinent to come with a common refer time.

The European Space Agency announced that space organisations and the world are considering how best to keep time on the moon. The idea took out at a meeting in the Netherlands last year in such the participants agreed on the imminent need to set up    “ a common lunar reference time” Pietro Giordana, a navigation system engineer of the space agency said.

“A joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this, “Giordano said in a statement.

As of now, a moon missions on the time of the country that is operating the spacecraft. The need is for an internationally accepted lunar time zone. This will be easier for all space-faring nations as mare countries and even private companies are aiming for the moon. The NASA is also getting art to send astronauts there.

 The question of time confounded NASA as it was designing and building the international Space Station, fast approaching the 25th anniversary of the launch of its first pierce. The space station doesn’t have its a time zone, But it runs on Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC which is meticulously based on atomic clocks. This ensures in splitting the time difference between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, and the other partnering space programmes in Russia, Japan and Europe.

Debate is going on among the international team looking into lunar time on whether a single organisation should set and maintain time on the moon.

When it comes to keeping time on the moon, there are technical issues involved. One being that clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, according to the space agency. Also, ticking occur differently on the lunar surface than in bar orbit.

The lunar time will have to be practical for astronauts there, noted the space agency’s Bernhard Hufenbach. NASA is gearing up for its first flight to the moon with astronauts in more than a half-century in 2024, with a lunar landing as early as 2025.

“This will be quite a challenge” with each day lasting as long as 29.5 Earth days, Hufenbach said in a statement. “But having established a working time system for the moon, we can go on to do the same for other planetary destination.” Mars standard Time, anyone?

Picture Credit : Google 

What important events happened in space in 2022?

Space and Science: From the spectacular images dispatched by the James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’S ambitious missions to explore the moon to the breakthrough in malaria vaccine and the invention of the half-a-millimetre-wide remote controlled, walking robot, the year 2022 witnessed plenty of wow moments in Space and Science.

1. HD 1

In April 2022, we discovered the most distant galaxy to date. Christened HD 1, this galaxy is some 13.5 billion light-years away. To explain why the galaxy was unusually bright in ultraviolet light, the astronomers propose that either HD1 might be forming stars at a very high rate or may be home to a supermassive black hole. HD 1 could also be home to the Population III stars, the very first stars of the Universe. The discovery of HD 1 also breaks the record of the GN-Z11 galaxy that was discovered in 2017, lying some 13.4 billion light-years away.

The distant early galaxy HD1, object in red, is shown at the centre of this undated zoom-in handout image.

2. China’s space milestones

In 2022, China took a firm foothold in space with significant additions to its own space station called “Tiangong”. The space station will assist future Chinese missions and also help carry out scientific research and enable the stay of astronauts for longer periods in space. In July 2022, it launched its laboratory module called “Wentian”. The final piece “Mengtian”, also a laboratory module, was launched and docked, thereby completing the basic construction of its space station. It may be recalled that China began construction of its space station with the “Tianhe” module, the main living quarters for astronauts in 2021. Seen here is the Long March 5B rocket, carrying China’s Mengtian science module, the final module of Tiangong space station, lifting off.

3. James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful space telescope (launched in December 2021), has been dispatching stellar images of the universe since July 2022, propelling astronomical research in new directions. It has captured the farthest and oldest galaxies seen to date; offered a detailed image of the famous Pillars of Creation; presented the clearest view of Neptune’s rings, and captured the geographical phenomenon on Jupiter’s surface. It also gave us the first evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet – all this from its orbit around the second Lagrange point, a million miles away from Earth. Seen here is the detailed image of the Pillars of Creation shared by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

4. DART mission

In a first-of-its-kind mission, NASA launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft successfully in September 2022. The mission aimed at deflecting asteroids was a step towards preparing the world for a potential future asteroid strike like the one which killed the dinosaurs millions of years ago. The first test DART mission targeted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a small body about 160 metres in diameter. NASA confirmed the mission altered the asteroid’s motion in space. The one-way trip proved how a spacecraft could intentionally collide with an asteroid in order to deflect it – a planetary defence against near-Earth objects. The last image to contain a complete view of asteroid Didymos (top left) and its moonlet, Dimorphos, about 2.5 minutes before the impact of NASA’S DART spacecraft.

5. Women in space

The year 2022 was a milestone year for women astronauts. Nicole Mann became the first native American woman to go to space. She was the commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission that blasted off in the Dragon Endurance spacecraft built by SpaceX in October 2022. Jessica Watkins became the first Black woman on a long-duration ISS mission. Nora Al Matrooshi became the first woman astronaut from the UAE. She trained at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston. She is the Arab world’s first woman astronaut and has joined the second batch of the UAE Astronaut Program, training with NASA for future space missions.

6. Artemis

Half a century after astronauts walked on the moon, NASA is a few steps away from putting humankind back on the Moon. The Artemis 1 mission, launched on November 16, was an uncrewed mission designed to test the viability of the Space Launch System, NASA’s next-generation rocket ship, and the Orion Space Capsule scheduled to enter lunar orbit and return to Earth after about 25 days. Artemis 1 demonstrated the capabilities of both SLS and Orion. Its success has cleared the path for Artemis II and III in 2024 and 2025, when astronauts will embark on lunar-flyby-return-to-earth test missions. Seen here is the Orion Capsule, launched on the Artemis rocket, getting drawn into the well deck of the USS Portland during recovery operations.

7. ISRO’s major milestones

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the country’s space agency, hit many milestones in 2022. The agency launched India’s first privately developed rocket “Vikram-suborbital (VKS)” in November 2022. It also test-fired the Astronaut Safety System for India’s ambitious Gaganyaan mission- the country’s manned mission to space. The year 2022’s last PSLV mission blasted off with one ocean research satellite and eight nanosatellites by Indian start-ups and Bhutan. The 200th consecutive launch of the multipurpose sounding rocket RH200 was also held. The agency successfully launched 36 Gen-1 satellites via the LVM3 launch vehicle as part of its commercial mission for the U.K.-based communications company OneWeb. Seen here is ISRO’s first privately developed Indian rocket Vikram-S being launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

8. Human Cell Atlas

In May 2022, about 2.300 researchers from 83 countries came up with a compilation called the Human Cell Atlas. The task involved mapping the positions of over a million cells across 33 different organs in the healthy human body. The aim of this international collaborative consortium is to help understand biology and diseases better. Cutting-edge single cell and spatial genomics and computational techniques were used. The compilation is seen as a major step towards analysing how illnesses can be diagnosed and treated. It is expected to eventually transform our understanding of the 37.2 trillion cells in the human body.

9. Monkeypox

In May 2022, another global health concern arose, when the viral disease Monkeypox was detected in the U.K Monkeypox is a viral zoonotic disease that has symptoms similar to those in smallpox patients. Come July and 90 percent of the cases were centered mainly around Europe. The World Health Organisation declared the monkeypox outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Over the months, with testing, surveillance, and vaccination, cases declined. JYNNEOS, a two-dose vaccine that was developed to protect against both mpox and smallpox was used during the outbreak. Monkeypox was renamed Mpox by the WHO. Seen here is a magnifying glass focusing on a vesicle rash created by monkeypox disease.

10. World’s smallest remote-controlled, walking robot

In May 2022, a team of engineers at the Northwestern University in the U.S. demonstrated the world’s smallest walking robots. They measured just half-a-millimeter wide. The crab-shaped remote-controlled invention is a milestone in the field of robotics because they are capable of performing practical tasks in tight spaces. The micro robot, scientists say, could repair small machines and even offer help in performing surgical tasks such as clearing clogged arteries or eliminating cancerous tumours. They are still in developmental stage and were primarily created for academic purpose. Nevertheless, the technology used to create them has potential for scaling.

11. Earth’s shortest day on record

On June 29 2022, we had the shortest day ever to be recorded since the 1960s. The Earth completed its rotation in 1.59 milliseconds less than its routine 24  hours. Scientists recorded this using atomic clocks. In recent years, Earth has been spinning faster and taking less time to complete its rotation. A study in 2016 found that in the previous 2,740 years, Earth’s rotation slowed by about six hours. This truncation of day length is attributed to climate effects. The speed depends on factors such as gravity, changes in winds, ancient ice sheets, dynamics of the planet’s core, and so on.

12.  Paper coating that behaves like plastic

Plastic is problematic. So, a team of researchers from the University of Japan developed a coating for the paper that makes it behave like plastic in July 2022. The coating, “Choetsu”, is claimed to be a cheap and safe mixture of chemicals. It makes the paper rigid, waterproof, bacteria-repelling, and durable. The initial target is to test its efficacy in food packaging. With the technology, paper is given some of the properties of plastic and is touted to degrade safely. The process involves dipping the paper structure into the coating mixture and drying it. The coating is low-cost and biodegradable.

13. Malaria vaccine breakthrough

In a major boost to the global fight against Malaria, one of the leading causes of child mortality, a new vaccine against the disease has been found to be highly effective. The scientists at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute who created the vaccine R21/ Matrix M published their trial results in September 2022. It is also the first malaria vaccine to meet and exceed the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) vaccine target of 75% efficacy against the deadly disease. The vaccine has been found to be 77% effective in early-stage trials. Malaria kills more than 4,00,000 people each year. Seen here is a feeding female Anopheles funestus mosquito, a known vector for malaria.

14. Zombie virus

A 48,500-year-old zombie virus that was trapped under a frozen lake in Russia emerged in November 2022. The zombie virus, which was revived by scientists, emerged as a result of global warming. According to the French scientists who published the study, the thawing of the permafrost a permanently frozen layer on or under – Earth’s surface-led to the release of the virus which was trapped and frozen for up to a million years. Scientists maintained that the zombie viruses are a health threat and that further studies need to be undertaken on the risk posed by ancient viral particles.

15. Nobel Prize for Science and Medicine 2022

Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger were awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics in December 2022. Their work established the quantum property of entanglement. The trio worked independently and were awarded for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell’s inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. Meanwhile, geneticist Svante Paabo was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The award was “for his research in the field of genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”. Instituted by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the Nobel Prize is presented to honour those from around the world for their remarkable achievements.

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What are UFOs?

Hundreds of new UFO reports, but…there is still no evidence of aliens. The Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, has set up a new office to track reports of UFO sightings and collect data.

What are UFOs?

A new Pentagon office set up to track reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOS) has received “several hundreds” of new reports. What are UFOS? Over the centuries, people have reported seeing strange airborne objects or unusual optical phenomena in the sky. These are called UFOS. Over the years, the belief that UFOs are the spaceships of aliens from other planets has gained ground – though without any concrete evidence. Are there possibilities of extraterrestrial life? Shouldn’t the sightings be tracked systematically? Well, that’s why the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was formed.

2. What is AARO?

The AARO was set up in July 2022 to track unidentified objects in the sky, underwater and in space. It was established following more than a year of attention on unidentified flying objects that military pilots have observed.

It focusses on unexplained activity around military installations, restricted airspace and “other areas of interest” and is aimed at helping identify possible threats to the safety of U.S. military operations and to national security.

3. Scientific approach

Sean Kirkpatrick, director, AARO, did not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial life and said he was taking a scientific approach to the research. Since the launch of the AARO, there have been several hundred new reports.

“We are structuring our analysis to be very thorough and rigorous. We will go through it all. And as a physicist, I have to adhere to the scientific method.”

4. No alien life

The U.S. military officially calls the 144 sightings observed between 2004 and 2021 as “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

But they have seen nothing that indicates alien life. “I have not seen anything that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation, an alien crash or anything like that,” said Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.

5. Quick facts

* The Air Force conducted an investigation into UFO activity called ‘Project Blue Book’. It ended in 1969 with a list of 12,618 sightings, 701 of which involved objects that officially remained “unidentified.”

* In 1994, it concluded that the 1947 famous “Roswell incident” in New Mexico, was not an UFO but a crashed balloon, the military’s long-standing explanation.

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What does a dust devil sound like on Mars?

Mars rover’s microphone captures ten seconds of rumbling noise created by dust devil on the Red Planet. It’s the same microphone that provided the first sounds of Martian wind in 2021.

What does a dust devil sound like on Mars? A NASA rover by chance had its microphone on when a whirling tower of red dust passed directly overhead, recording the racket.

It’s about 10 seconds of not only rumbling gusts of up to 40 kph, but the pinging of hundreds of dust particles against the rover Perseverance. Scientists released the first-of-its-kind audio. It sounds strikingly similar to dust devils on Earth, although quieter since Mars’ thin atmosphere makes for more muted sounds and less forceful wind, according to the researchers.

The dust devil came and went over Perseverance quickly last year, thus the short length of the audio, said the University of Toulouse’s Naomi Murdoch, lead author of the study appearing in Nature Communications.

At the same time, the navigation camera on the parked rover captured images, while its weather-monitoring instrument collected data.

“It was fully caught red-handed by Persy,” said co-author German Martinez of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Photographed for decades at Mars but never heard until now, dust devils are common at the red planet.

This one was in the average range: at least 400 feet (118 metres) tall and 80 feet (25 metres) across, travelling at 16 feet (5 metres) per second.

The microphone picked up 308 dust pings as the dust devil whipped by, said Murdoch, who helped build it.

Given that the rover’s SuperCam microphone is turned on for less than three minutes every few days, Murdoch said it was “definitely luck” that the dust devil appeared when it did on Sept. 27, 2021. She estimates there was just a 1-in-200 chance of capturing dust-devil audio. Of the 84 minutes collected in its first year, there’s “only one dust devil recording,” she wrote in an email from France.

WHAT IS A DUST DEVIL?

  • Common across Mars, dust devils are short-lived whirlwinds loaded with dust that form when there is a major difference between ground and air temperatures.
  • They are a common feature in the Jezero crater, where the Perseverance rover has been operational since February 2021 – but it had never before managed to record audio of one of them.
  • By chance on September 27, 2021, a dust devil 118 metres high and 25 metres wide passed directly over the rover.
  • This time, the microphone on the rover’s SuperCam managed to catch the muffled, whirring sounds.

Sounds…so far

  • The same microphone on Perseverance’s mast provided the first sounds from Mars namely the Martian wind soon after the rover landed in February 2021.
  • It followed up with audio of the rover driving around and its companion helicopter, little Ingenuity, flying nearby, as well as the crackle of the rover’s rock-zapping lasers, the main reason for the microphone.

ROCK SAMPLES

On the prowl for rocks that might contain signs of ancient microbial life, Perseverance has collected 18 samples so far at Jezero Crater, once the scene of a river delta. NASA plans to return these samples to Earth a decade from now. Its helicopter Ingenuity has logged 36 flights, the longest lasting almost three minutes.

CAN ACOUSTIC DATA SOLVE THE MARTIAN MYSTERY?

  • These recordings allow scientists to study the Martian wind, atmospheric turbulence and now dust movement as never before.
  • The impact of the dust-made “tac tac tac sounds will let researchers count the number of particles to study the whirlwind’s structure and behaviour.
  • It could also help solve a mystery that has puzzled scientists. On some parts of Mars, whirlwinds pass by sucking up dust, cleaning the solar panels of rovers along the way.
  • Understanding why this happens could help scientists build a model to predict where the whirlwinds might strike next.
  • It could even shed light on the great dust storms that sweep across the planet, famously depicted in the 2015 science-fiction film “The Martian”.

Picture Credit : Google