Space @ interstellar news

NASA's Mars rover Perseverance still on track for July launch despite coronavirus outbreak NASA is determined to get its life-hunting Mars rover off the ground this summer despite the  coronavirus outbreak . Space agency officials remain optimistic that the car-size  Perseverance rover , the centerpiece of the Mars 2020 mission, will be ready to launch during a three-week window that opens on July 17. The stakes are high, because such windows come just once every 26 months, when Earth and the Red Planet align properly for interplanetary missions. "We’re going to ensure that we meet that launch window in July," Lori Glaze, the director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said during a virtual town hall meeting on March 19,  according to SpaceNews . "As of right now, and even if we go to a next stage of alert, Mars 2020 is moving forward on schedule. And everything is, so far, very well on track." For example, engineers recently integrated two...

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Black hole quasar tsunamis moving at 46 million miles per hour When science reality is more interesting than science fiction Astronomers have discovered the universe’s most powerful winds: driven by supermassive black holes, they ripple across interstellar space bulldozing through material in galaxies, and are known as quasar tsunamis, we're told. “No other phenomena carries more mechanical energy,”  said  Nahum Arav, first author of a study into the winds, and a physics professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in the US. “The amount of mechanical energy that these outflows carry is up to several hundreds of times higher than the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy." Move over, gamma-ray bursts, which are some of the most energetic events recorded in the universe: quasar tsunamis generate more energy in the long run, Arav explained. “Over the lifetime of t...

How To Take A Selfie On Mars NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover recently took a dramatic selfie on the slopes of Mt. Sharp, just before starting its steepest climb ever. The rover sent home a composite photo of itself posing proudly in front of the hole it had just drilled in the bedrock of Mt. Sharp, with a steep, crumbling rock outcrop called Greenheugh Pediment standing starkly against a dusty Martian sky in the background. As Curiosity prepared to start its record-setting climb, it paused to film a  quick tutorial video with the black-and-white Navigation Camera mounted on its mast (the component that looks a bit like it should be the rover’s head, adorable wide eyes and all). “We get asked so often how Curiosity takes a selfie. We thought the best way to explain it would be to let the rover show everyone from its own point of view just how it’s done,” said Doug Ellison, Curiosity camera operator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in  a recent press release . ...

How Astronomers Could Sharpen The Image Of A Black Hole The supermassive black hole in M87 has a mass of more than 6 billion Suns. It is so large that its event horizon could easily swallow our entire system. It is also 53 million light-years away, which makes it rather difficult to observe. Its apparent size is similar to that of a baseball placed on the surface of the Moon. To observe such a distant and faint object, it took an international team of radio astronomers. They tied together observatories from all over the world through a process known as  interferometry , and created a virtual telescope  nearly the size of Earth . Months of gathered data then had to be shipped to computational facilities where the data was processed to create the first direct image of a black hole. While this was a monumental achievement, the image itself seemed rather unimpressive to some. That’s it? All this work for a blurry image with a dark center? What does that tell us about ...

NASA fixes Mars lander by hitting it with a shovel (CNN) NASA may have a multi-billion dollar budget and some of the most advanced technology in the world, but when the  Mars InSight  lander got into a spot of bother, scientists came up with a charmingly rudimentary fix for its space technology: Hit it with a shovel. The trouble started when a heat probe, known as the "mole," did not manage to dig into the  red planet  as planned last year. This was due to a lack of friction, which the probe needs in order to burrow into the soil, according to a NASA  statement . After several months, the NASA InSight Twitter account outlined its strategy as "giving it a push with my robotic arm." And the team has now announced that progress is being made. Now the team hopes the mole can get on with measuring heat under the surface of the planet, providing information that will help scientists work out how Mars, and all rocky planets, were formed. InSight, ...

Infinite subrings' may be next frontier for photographing black holes Black-hole photography could be even more powerful and revelatory than scientists had thought. Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project unveiled the  first-ever imagery of a black hole , laying bare the supermassive monster at the heart of the galaxy M87. The landmark photos have opened new doors, allowing scientists to probe exotic space-time realms like never before. And that probing may go much deeper still in the not-too-distant future. The most prominent feature in the EHT imagery, a bright but unresolved ring around M87's supermassive  black hole , likely contains a thin "photon ring" that  is composed of an infinite sequence of subrings, a new study reports.  The intricate structure of this photon ring holds a treasure trove of information about the black hole — information that scientists can access by extending the EHT's reach a bit, study team members said...