Space

NASA have put a great deal of work into the engineering for a sample return but I can't find any papers or blog posts or any sign of prepration for the legal side of the return mission. We are strongly protected by many environmental laws and laws to protect human health that we didn’t have at the time of Apollo. These laws don’t rely on the Outer Space Treaty for their legal basis. How NASA categorizes Mars makes no difference to them. See the article by Margaret Race of the SETI institute. NASA is going to send a sample caching rover to Mars in 2020 and they hope to send a second mission in…

While they last, gamma-ray bursts outshine stars and even galactic quasars. They are the most energetic phenomenon known to humankind, resulting from the formation of neutron stars or black holes as dying stars collapse. They are triggered by outflows of plasma ejected near the speed of light.  They usually display energies in the region of tens of giga-electron-volts but why not even greater? Indeed, it is no longer speculation, a gamma-ray burst in the region of a tera-electron-volt has been detected. Which means these energies might actually be common. During the height of the Cold…

Right now all our missions to Mars are sterilized to protect it from any Earth life that could hitch a ride and confuse the searches. A report by the “Planetary Protection Independent Review Board” recommends that NASA treats most of Mars similarly to the Moon for planetary protection. It comes with a cover letter from NASA recommending to their planetary protection officer that they implement the proposal. This would be fine if Mars was like the Moon. However, new discoveries show that Mars has liquid water there, in the form of brines, just a few centimeters below the surface. The…

The Daily Express run this fake meme on many of their fake asteroid stories. It is riddled with errors and outright lies. The red top tabloid papers in the UK are well known for just making stuff up. The most famous red top tabloid story which ran in The Sun, another similar paper here. They made up the story that Freddie Starr, a comedian ate a hamster in a sandwich. He never ate any hamster. We get so many people scared of asteroids as a result of the fake news about them in the Daily Express. They say, a dozen times a year or more, that NASA has issued an asteroid impact warning about some…

ESO’s X-shooter spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope in Chile has detected a freshly made heavy element, strontium, in space, in the aftermath two merging neutron stars.  That sounds obscure but it means that the heavier elements in the Universe can form in neutron star mergers, a clue in the puzzle of chemical element formation.  Astronomers suspected that, if heavier elements did form in neutron star collisions, signatures of those elements could be detected in kilonovae, the explosive aftermaths of neutron star mergers, so they turned the VLT's X-shooter on the neutron star…

This is me according to the Daily Express. End of world: Scientist’s terrifying warning of apocalypse asteroid - ‘Would boil oceans!’ It is nonsense! I gave no warning, and as a science blogger I am not the person to issue a warning either. I wrote an article to HELP scared people who panic about such things. It was awful and many are panicking and it is not impossible someone has committed suicide over this. skip to One of numerous false asteroid stories This is an example to show how utterly unreliable the Daily Express is. Short summary: This is still scaring people and their story…

Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system but 550 light years away in the inconspicuous constellation of Lepus, underneath the bright Orion constellation, an exo-Io could be hidden at the exoplanet system WASP-49b.  The possible exomoon would orbit a hot giant planet, which in turn would race once around its host star in less than three days.  Theoretically, large amounts of sodium at an exoplanet could point to a hidden moon or ring of material, and ten years ago, researchers at Virginia calculated that such a compact system of three bodies:…

The pulsar wind nebula surrounding pulsar B0540-69 has brightened gradually and astrophysicists say that is because  the pulsar experienced a sudden spin-down rate transition. But why? The answer may lie in the mysterious magnetic field structure of the pulsar. Pulsars are highly magnetized neutron stars born from supernova explosions of massive stars. They typically have radii about 10 km and surface magnetic field strengths around 1 trillion Gauss. According to classic pulsar theory, an isolated pulsar loses energy through magnetic dipole radiation and thus slows down. However,…

This is me according to the Daily Express. End of world: Scientist’s terrifying warning of apocalypse asteroid - ‘Would boil oceans!’ It is nonsense! I gave no warning, and as a science blogger I am not the person to issue a warning either. I wrote an article to HELP scared people who panic about such things. It was awful and many are panicking and it is not impossible someone has committed suicide over this. skip to One of numerous false asteroid stories This is an example to show how utterly unreliable the Daily Express is. Short summary: This is still scaring people and their story…

Elon Musk has just tweeted about his "Nuke Mars to terraform it" idea. He talked about that some years back, in 2015 when many people responded with articles saying it is impossible. Now he is tweeting again. This is surely just a joke. He can't be serious. Even 3000 nuclear bombs a day exploding over Mars as in his "minisuns" idea is likely not enough. Here is his throwaway remark about it in 2015. It was reasonably clear he was not putting forward a serious worked out future plan for Mars. But is there any potential in the idea? He talks about it here at 2 minutes in to this video. He…