Category: space

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NASA Found a “Dragon” on Mars…Let’s Take a Look

Mars is a fascinating planet we’re only just beginning to understand thanks in part to NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The MRO is equipped with a High Resolution Imagine Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera that has already taken some amazing pictures. But fantasy and sci-fi fans have noticed that the MRO has captured images that really speak to their nerdy sense of entertainment.

Fans of Star Trek can point to this imprint of the Starfleet Emblem. See for yourself!

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/UArizona

Take a look at this close-up!

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/UArizona

The MRO has also captured images of what looks like the House Stark Direwolf sigil from Game of Thrones.

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/UArizona

Mars is prone to dry dust avalanches that cause changes to the makeup of the planet’s surface.

The HiRISE MRO then caught the changes to this landscape, which you can see in black below.

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/UArizona

So how is it possible to get such detailed pictures of Mars’ surface? Great question! The MRO HiRISE camera has been orbiting around Mars since 2006 and is the most powerful camera to ever grace the orbit of another planet.

With its super-high resolution of 30 centimeters, or 11.8 inches, per pixel, the MRO HiRISE camera really gives you a feel for life on Mars. The camera has only captured images of about 2.4% of Mars’ surface.

The MRO continues to take pictures of a rocky formation called Melas Chasma, which is a part of a canyon system called Valles Marineris.

Check out this formation, which looks like a dragon from space!

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/UArizona

Pretty cool, huh?

In the meantime, the HiRISE continues to monitor Mars’ surface and revealing photos to the public as they come. You can check out their discoveries on Twitter.

What did you think of these photos? Do these really look like the symbols we think they are?

Share your opinion in the comments below!

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Carl Sagan’s team wanted to include…

Carl Sagan’s team wanted to include the Beatles song “Here Comes the Sun” on the Voyager Golden Records (discs containing greetings in 60 languages, music and sounds from Earth aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977), but the record company EMI, which held the copyrights, declined.

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Some of the Best Photos NASA’s Curiosity Rover Has Taken in Its 8 Years on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity landed on Mars on August 6, 2012 – if you remember, you could even sort of livestream its Martian landing. It became the only functional robot on the planet after NASA’s Opportunity stopped communicating on February 13, 2019.

After nearly 8 years of service, the Curiosity has taken some amazing pictures of the Red Planet (and it’s still trundling around doing it’s thing). You can check out the thousands of images on NASA’s official website.

In the meantime, here’s a quick preview of the beauty of Mars.

15. Curiosity Selfie!

Even robots want to take a picture now and then.

14. A Petrified Area

These patterns are just beautiful.

13. Check out These Gorgeous Views

Worthy of a museum exhibit!

12. Checking out Its Own Wheel Track

It’s a meta portrait.

11. An Active Sand Dune

Called Gobabeb, this sand dune belongs to a dune field called Bagnold.

10. Mount Sharp’s Base

This is mudstone.

9. Yet Another Shot of Mount Sharp

These sedimentary rocks are still charming to look at.

8. A Wide Shot

Actually taken from a Mars Orbiter, not by Curiosity.

7. Fracture Shot

This has many rocks that look as if they’ve been, well, fractured.

6. A Rocky Dreamscape

It looks like a dream!

5. Wide-Shot of Mount Sharp

This far-off view definitely speaks for itself!

4. The Bottom of Mount Sharp

There are many great angles of this mountain.

3. Take a Gander at This!

It’s called Jake Matijevic Rock.

2. The “Harrison” Rock

There are some crystals in this shot too!

1. Martian Sunset

If it looks other-worldly, that’s because it is!

As of now, the Curiosity is still doing strong on Mars.

If you’ve got thoughts, we totally look forward to hearing anything you have to say about these landscapes. All scientific facts, discussion, and theories are totally welcome in the comments.

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Patagonia’s CEO Donated Company’s $10 Million Tax Cut to Fight Climate Change

As much as some people (and organizations) out there would like to bury their heads in the sand and pretend climate change doesn’t exist, it is very real, and its effects are growing more drastic.

Because of the 2018 rewrite of America’s tax laws – a tax code revision that greatly benefited corporations by lowering the corporate tax rate by almost a third for most companies – Patagonia paid $10 million less in taxes that year than it had anticipated. So the company’s CEO, Rose Marcario, decided to donate the $10 million to non-profit groups that are working to fight climate change and help the environment.

Marcario believed the corporate tax cut was not a good thing, and she wrote, “Based on last year’s irresponsible tax cut, Patagonia will owe less in taxes this year—$10 million less, in fact. Instead of putting the money back into our business, we’re responding by putting $10 million back into the planet. Our home planet needs it more than we do.”

Speaking about climate change deniers, including many in government, Marcario wrote, “Far too many have suffered the consequences of global warming in recent months, and the political response has so far been woefully inadequate—and the denial is just evil.”

Patagonia has been a friend of the environment for many years now and their website says the company has donated more than $89 million to environmental groups to fight climate change.

Let’s hope that more corporations and individuals make their voices heard about the extreme consequences of climate change that are occurring around us every day. This isn’t something that might happen in the future, this is taking place right now.

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The sun looks like caramel corn

A new telescope built to study the Sun has released its first images. They show the surface of the Sun in the most exquisite detail we’ve ever seen – revealing convection granules the size of Texas, and tiny magnetic features – the roots of fields that extend far into space. via sciencealert.com

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Wow! Astronomers Watched a Star Skip the Supernova Stage and Go Straight to Black Hole.

When people say “go out with a bang”, they usually don’t mean literally. But when it comes to dying stars, typically astronomers expect them to go out with enormous bangs: supernovae. However, recently a group of Ohio University scientists observed a star that didn’t have quite the same life path in mind.

Instead of exploding and then collapsing in on itself, the star turned directly into a black hole. That shocked the group of scientists who had been studying the star, named N6946-BH1 to be exact, which was located in the Fireworks Galaxy, 22 million light-years away. At first they didn’t think it was possible, yet in 2015, after six years of watching the star weaken, scientists concluded that the star had bizarrely skipped the supernova stage.

They chalked it up as a “massive fail.” That’s a technical term, referring to the star’s mass.

“The typical view is that a star can form a black hole only after it goes supernova,” said Ohio State astronomy professor and study researcher Christopher Kochanek. “If a star can fall short of a supernova and still make a black hole, that would help explain why we don’t see supernovae from the most massive stars.”

Photo Credit: Pexels

This atypical event still requires more analysis, but scientist Scott Adams estimates that massive fails occur in about 10 to 30 percent of massive stars. Ultimately, this discovery could lead to more answers about how super-massive black holes come to exist, since supernovae tend to blow away a lot of a star’s mass.

Without a supernova, more of a star’s mass would stick around to collapse in on itself and become a vortex that bends time and space and eats light for supper.

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This is Officially the Hottest Place on Earth

The past ten years were the hottest in recorded history, and it has seen record-breaking average yearly temperatures and single-day temperatures in places across the globe. This is largely due to global climate change, and it’s a dangerous trend.

However…

According to the World Meteorological Organization, the hottest temperature ever recorded was a sweltering 134 degrees Fahrenheit at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California, way back in July 10, 1913.

Up until 2012, the record on file – 136.4 degrees Fahrenheit – occurred in El Azizia, Libya, and was recorded in 1922. But it was disqualified 90 years later because, according to the Guiness Book of World Records, the temperature could have been off by up to seven degrees due to the type of surface on which the measurement was taken.

Dallol, Ethiopia, is considered the hottest regularly inhabited place.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Back to Death Valley. Air temperatures there typically reach 120 degrees due to its geographic location and boiling desert environment. The area receives less than three inches of average annual rainfall, and the sun beats down on the ground – 190 feet below sea level and enclosed by mountains.

So, in Death Valley, hot air rises and gets trapped by the surrounding mountain ranges. Then it cools and falls back into the valley. As it falls, where it’s heated again by then sun and the high air pressure down on the valley floor. That’s how the area holds the record for highest recorded air temperature.

Death Valley, though, is not the only hot spot around.

Photo Credit: Billy Hathorn

In Yellowstone National Park, the geothermal pools often reach 250 degrees Fahrenheit and above. According to National Geographic, vents on the ocean floor release liquids at 750 degrees Fahrenheit and higher. The Earth’s core is estimated to have a temperature of a super scorching 11,000-degrees. In our solar system, scientists say the hottest place is the sun’s core which is about 15 million Kelvin, or roughly 26 million degrees Fahrenheit.

If you’re looking for the hottest location in the universe, that seems to be, surprisingly, just outside of Geneva, Switzerland. At the Large Hadron Collider, scientists and engineers smash atoms in their experiments.

Photo Credit: Flickr

According to Inside Science News Service, the temperature inside the equipment reaches an incredible 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (if just for short bursts).

That’s a valid excuse for sweating.

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A Teenager Discovered a Planet on the Third Day of His NASA Internship

These kids today…are pretty great, as it turns out!

At least, some of them are.

On only the third day into his internship at NASA, a 17-year-old named Wolf Cukier (awesome name) discovered a new planet that is being called “TOI 1338 b”. The planet is 6.9 times larger than Earth, and the folks at NASA believe the planet will be in a stable orbit for at least the next 10 million years. It is located roughly 1,300 light-years away from Earth.

 

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The teenager discovered the planet while looking at “variations in star brightness” in images captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Cukier is from Scarsdale, New York, and he completed a two-month internship last summer with NASA at their Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Cukier said, “I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other and from our view eclipse each other every orbit. About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.”

NASA just recently confirmed Cukier’s findings, and they submitted a paper co-written by the teenager about the discovery of the new planet.

Let’s get to meet this whiz kid, shall we?

Cukier also confirmed that he is indeed now looking for other new planets. Keep up the great work!

As the saying goes, the kids are alright.

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