I hope all of you spacefans that could, enjoyed the Solar eclipse without retinal damage.This month we bid farewell to Cassini and look ahead to the future InSight mission to Mars, plus the Breakthrough Listen project has been picking up some intruiging signals from a galaxy far, far away…
If you missed the eclipse due to living under a rock, you can watch its full splendour thanks to NASA:
Credit: NASA
A Fond Farewell to Cassini
Cassini is mere days away from its last journey, its final, fatal dive into the mysterious clouds of Saturn. The spacecraft’s final plunge is now unaviodable as a gravitational slingshot delivered by Saturn’s huge moon Titan set it on its one way trip back in April. This doesn’t in any way stop the combined space agencies fron NASA and Europe from wringing every last bit of scientific data out of the craft’s swan song. All of its scientific intruments apart from its camera will be operational up until radio contact is lost.
“The Cassini mission has been packed full of scientific firsts, and our unique planetary revelations will continue to the very end of the mission as Cassini becomes Saturn’s first planetary probe, sampling Saturn’s atmosphere up until the last second,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “We’ll be sending data in near real time as we rush headlong into the atmosphere it’s truly a first-of-its-kind event at Saturn.”
Credit: JPL
Cassini has had an amazingly long tour of duty thanks I’m sure to the excellent planning, design and engineering characteristic of how us space science types like to keep our missions going for as long as possible. Its original mission was for four years, which was then extended by a further two years, then another seven years with the Cassini Solstice Mission, this massive extension saw Cassini explore so much more of the Saturnian system. Its mission was always to have ended by diving into Saturn’s atmosphere, a plan made even more important due to planetary protection considerations in light of its recent discoveries about Saturn’s moon Enceladus and the possibility that it could potentially harbour life.
“The end of Cassini’s mission will be a poignant moment, but a fitting and very necessary completion of an astonishing journey,” said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The Grand Finale represents the culmination of a seven-year plan to use the spacecraft’s remaining resources in the most scientifically productive way possible. By safely disposing of the spacecraft in Saturn’s atmosphere, we avoid any possibility Cassini could impact one of Saturn’s moons somewhere down the road, keeping them pristine for future exploration.”
Cassin’s revelatations about Saturn’s icy little moon are one thing, but we can’t forget its big brother Titan, whose size has in fact enabled the misson’s multiple flybys with its gravitational assistance and of course given us so much data about this huge, mysterious moon. All I can say is ‘Fly dangerous’ Cassini o7.
InSight Mission to Mars to Launch Next Spring
Previously scheduled for March 2016, the mission was put on hold due to a leaky seismometer, or rather the container protecting it. The whole point of the mission is to see as far inside the planet as possible in order to gain more information as to not just the history of Mars itself, but that of all the rocky planets in our Solar system.
“We have fixed the problem we had two years ago, and we are eagerly preparing for launch,” said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman, of JPL.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems is assembling and testing the InSight spacecraft in a clean room facility near Denver. “Our team resumed system-level integration and test activities last month,” said Stu Spath, spacecraft program manager at Lockheed Martin. “The lander is completed and instruments have been integrated onto it so that we can complete the final spacecraft testing including acoustics, instrument deployments and thermal balance tests.
Credit: NASA
“Because the interior of Mars has churned much less than Earth’s in the past three billion years, Mars likely preserves evidence about rocky planets’ infancy better than our home planet does,” said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
Our own planet Earth is still very active seismically, a fact you should all be grateful for as we wouldn’t be here without it. Earthquakes are bad I hear you say? However, their existence means that tectonics drive our entire biosphere, all of those complex interactions between land, sea and air, putting it very simply.
Mars’ tectonic engine broke down billions of years ago, yet traces of it still remain, including marsquakes, which we want to measure of course. We also want to see how much heat remains at its core and to get more accurate data on how it peturbates on its axis which will help us find out how big that core is. Unlike the previous Mars rovers, this lander is designed to stay put at a location near Mars’ equator and adds to the robot population of the planet.
MORE FAST RADIO BURSTS DETECTED
A dwarf galaxy 2.5 billion light years away, with the catchy name of FRB 121102, is still perplexing astronomers. The Breakthrough Listen SETI project has picked up 15 new signals all from the same location. Previous fast radio bursts have been observed, very rarely I might add, a couple of dozen is all that has been recorded so far. They happen very quickly so you have to be looking at the right patch of sky at the right time, however these are the only ones to have repeated and at a higher frequency than has been found before.
“Previously we thought there wasn’t much emission at high or low frequencies, but now it looks like there is,” says Avi Loeb at Harvard University. “It’s twice as high as the typical frequency that was previously claimed for this repeater.”
“It’s very funky how the individual bursts can pop up anywhere in this wide range of frequencies, even though each individual burst has a relatively narrow frequency coverage,” says Peter Williams, also at Harvard University. “I have yet to see anyone offer up a good explanation for how that might happen.”
No one as yet knows what causes these phenomenen as it could be a black hole, an active galaxy nucleus or… We only have a sample of one repeating signal so far, we need more of course. The job of an astrobiologist is never done.
See you next time, spacefans.
Header Image: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is shown heading for the gap between Saturn and its rings during one of 22 such dives of the mission’s finale in this illustration. The spacecraft will make a final plunge into the planet’s atmosphere on Sept. 15. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
