Hubble Space Telescope Images.

MESSIER 56 The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of Messier 56 (also known as M 56 or NGC 6779), located about 33,000 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Lyra (The Lyre). The stars in the globular cluster are tightly bound together by gravity.

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Walking dinosaur, Columbus Interactive Science Museum

Hubble’s Messier Catalog by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Masterpieces of Mesozoic Seas

on stories, leaving a mark, and wanting to be remembered

1. Jack Rackham in Black Sails s04e10 2. John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. 3. Carl Sagan on Voyager’s Golden Record 4. Ada Limón, During the Impossible Age of Everyone. 5. Paleolithic handprints in Cueva de las Manos, Argentina 6. Sappho, If Not, Winter (translated by Anne Carson)

Ultra-Close Orbits of Saturn = Ultra-Cool Science

On Sept. 15, 2017, our Cassini spacecraft ended its epic exploration of Saturn with a planned dive into the planet’s atmosphere–sending back new science to the very last second. The spacecraft is gone, but the science continues!

New research emerging from the final orbits represents a huge leap forward in our understanding of the Saturn system – especially the mysterious, never-before-explored region between the planet and its rings. Some preconceived ideas are turning out to be wrong while new questions are being raised. How did they form? What holds them in place? What are they made of?

Six teams of researchers are publishing their work Oct. 5 in the journal Science, based on findings from Cassini’s Grand Finale. That’s when, as the spacecraft was running out of fuel, the mission team steered Cassini spectacularly close to Saturn in 22 orbits before deliberately vaporizing it in a final plunge into the atmosphere in September 2017.

Knowing Cassini’s days were numbered, its mission team went for gold. The spacecraft flew where it was never designed to fly. For the first time, it probed Saturn’s magnetized environment, flew through icy, rocky ring particles and sniffed the atmosphere in the 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer-wide) gap between the rings and the cloud tops. Not only did the engineering push the spacecraft to its limits, the new findings illustrate how powerful and agile the instruments were.

Many more Grand Finale science results are to come, but today’s highlights include:

Complex organic compounds embedded in water nanograins rain down from Saturn’s rings into its upper atmosphere. Scientists saw water and silicates, but they were surprised to see also methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The composition of organics is different from that found on moon Enceladus – and also different from those on moon Titan, meaning there are at least three distinct reservoirs of organic molecules in the Saturn system.

For the first time, Cassini saw up close how rings interact with the planet and observed inner-ring particles and gases falling directly into the atmosphere. Some particles take on electric charges and spiral along magnetic-field lines, falling into Saturn at higher latitudes – a phenomenon known as “ring rain.” But scientists were surprised to see that others are dragged quickly into Saturn at the equator. And it’s all falling out of the rings faster than scientists thought – as much as 10,000 kg of material per second.

Scientists were surprised to see what the material looks like in the gap between the rings and Saturn’s atmosphere. They knew that the particles throughout the rings ranged from large to small. They thought material in the gap would look the same. But the sampling showed mostly tiny, nanograin- and micron-sized particles, like smoke, telling us that some yet-unknown process is grinding up particles. What could it be? Future research into the final bits of data sent by Cassini may hold the answer.

Saturn and its rings are even more interconnected than scientists thought. Cassini revealed a previously unknown electric current system that connects the rings to the top of Saturn’s atmosphere.

Scientists discovered a new radiation belt around Saturn, close to the planet and composed of energetic particles. They found that while the belt actually intersects with the innermost ring, the ring is so tenuous that it doesn’t block the belt from forming.

Unlike every other planet with a magnetic field in our Solar System, Saturn’s magnetic field is almost completely aligned with its spin axis. Think of the planet and the magnetic field as completely separate things that are both spinning. Both have the same center point, but they each have their own axis about which they spin. But for Saturn the two axes are essentially the same – no other planet does that, and we did not think it was even possible for this to happen. This new data shows a magnetic-field tilt of less than 0.0095 degrees. (Earth’s magnetic field is tilted 11 degrees from its spin axis.) According to everything scientists know about how planetary magnetic fields are generated, Saturn should not have one. It’s a mystery physicists will be working to solve.

Cassini flew above Saturn’s magnetic poles, directly sampling regions where radio emissions are generated. The findings more than doubled the number of reported crossings of radio sources from the planet, one of the few non-terrestrial locations where scientists have been able to study a mechanism believed to operate throughout the universe. How are these signals generated? That’s still a mystery researchers are looking to uncover.

For the Cassini mission, the science rolling out from Grand Finale orbits confirms that the calculated risk of diving into the gap – skimming the upper atmosphere and skirting the edge of the inner rings – was worthwhile.

Almost everything going on in that region turned out to be a surprise, which was the importance of going there, to explore a place we’d never been before. And the expedition really paid off!

Analysis of Cassini data from the spacecraft’s instruments will be ongoing for years to come, helping to paint a clearer picture of Saturn.

To read the papers published in Science, visit: URL to papers

To learn more about the ground-breaking Cassini mission and its 13 years at Saturn, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Storyville - The Farthest: Voyager’s Interstellar Journey

Launched 16 days apart in 1977, the twin Voyager space probes have defied all the odds, survived countless near misses and over 40 years later continue to beam revolutionary information across unimaginable distances. With less computing power than a modern hearing aid, they have unlocked the stunning secrets of our solar system.

The golden record contains greetings in 55 languages, animal sounds and 27 musical clips from around the world, among them Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode.

It’s amazing that billions of years from now [after humans are long gone] Voyager will still be chugging along.

Saturn’s atmosphere exhibits a banded pattern similar to Jupiter’s, but Saturn’s bands are much fainter and are much wider near the equator. The nomenclature used to describe these bands is the same as on Jupiter. Saturn’s finer cloud patterns were not observed until the flybys of the Voyager spacecraft during the 1980s. Since then, Earth-based telescopy has improved to the point where regular observations can be made. The composition of the clouds varies with depth and increasing pressure.

The winds on Saturn are the second fastest among the Solar System’s planets, after Neptune’s. Voyager data indicate peak easterly winds of 500 m/s (1,800 km/h).

Thermography has shown that Saturn’s south pole has a warm polar vortex, the only known example of such a phenomenon in the Solar System. Whereas temperatures on Saturn are normally −185 °C, temperatures on the vortex often reach as high as −122 °C, suspected to be the warmest spot on Saturn.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute and Kevin M. Gill

Nightfall

I feel my favorite Sci-Fi story of all times must be Isaac Asimov's 'Nightfall' (SPOILERS ahead btw) (the title in my language is even better, "And Darkness Shall Come").

To quickly summarize from memory, the story is set on a planet where people live in constant daylight because their homeworld is illuminated by one of six suns at all times. By the time of the narrative, they have reached an industrialized, roughly early 20th-century style civilization.

A prophecy speaks of a cycle where the planet will fall into complete darkness, and now scientists have discovered that it is not just a fairy tale - apparently, one day soon another planet is gonna block out all the suns for a period of about 12 hours.

Disturbingly, another part of the prophecy is confirmed as well - archaeologists discover that the planet's cities have been burned to the ground every time the darkness came, resetting civilization, and only returning to the old level of development after thousands of years.

The prophecy says that people will go mad in the darkness, when they look up to the sky and the stars appear.

Now, scientists and governments are alarmed, but not panicked. They look at their technolgical progress and understanding of the universe, and they are confident their civilization will not fall like the others. They know their people are literate, the current level of knowledge about the cosmos is widespread - including the theory that there might even be more than one solar system.

Electrical lights exist, but on this planet they only have niche applications in things like mining operations and bunker construction. Outfitting entire cities with them is not feasible on short notice, and also considered a waste of resources - 12 hours without sunlight should be perfectly survivable for an advanced and enlightened people.

There are experiments to simulate the effects of the darkness on the psyche. One scientists sits in a dark room with a few dozen holes in the ceiling, to simulate these fabled "stars", and declares it's manageable.

Then the big day arrives - or rather, ends.

The suns disappear, and darkness falls across the land.

And people look up, and they see this

And their civilization ends within 12 hours.