My Science School

Discovery about an Earth-like planet orbiting an M dwarf could imply that planets orbiting the most common star may be uninhabitable.

Is Earth the only planet that supports life? This is one of the many questions for which we don't have an answer yet. In a universe filled with countless stars and innumerable planets, our quest for life on a planet other than our own continues.

A new discovery could serve as a signpost and maybe even dramatically narrow our search for life on other planets. The discovery, explained in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in October by researchers from the University of California - Riverside, reveals that an Earth-like planet orbiting an M dwarf appears to have no atmosphere at all.

Most common type of star M dwarfs or red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the universe. This discovery could therefore imply that a large number of planets orbiting these stars may also lack atmospheres, and will therefore likely not support life.

The planet named GJ 1252b is slightly larger than our Earth, but is much closer to its star, an M dwarf, than the Earth is to the sun. On a single day on Earth, this planet orbits its star twice.

In order to find out if this planet lacks an atmosphere, astronomers measured infrared radiation from the planet as its light was during a secondary eclipse. In a secondary eclipse, the planet passes behind the star, and hence the planet's light along with the light reflected from its star are blocked.

Scorching temperatures

The radiation revealed the planet's daytime temperatures to be of the order of 2,242 degrees Fahrenheit. This, along with assumed low surface pressure, led the astronomers to believe that GJ 1252b lacks an atmosphere.

The researchers concluded that the planet will not be able to hold on to an atmosphere, even if it had tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide, which traps heat. Even if an atmosphere builds up initially, it would taper off and erode away eventually.

With M dwarf stars having more flares, the likelihood of planets surrounding them closely holding onto their atmospheres goes down further. The lack of atmosphere means that life as we know it is unlikely to flourish.

In Earth’s  solar neighbourhood, there are about 5,000 stars and most of them are M dwarfs. If planets surrounding them can be ruled -out entirely in the search for life based on this discovery, that would leave roughly around 1,000 stars similar to the sun that could be habitable.

For now, however, these can't be ruled out entirely. Nor can we rule out the possibility of a planet far enough away from an M dwarf star such that it retains its atmosphere. We need more research and results as we continue to embark on our search for life elsewhere.

Picture Credit : Google 

Brown dwarfs are also known as failed stars. Why? Find out

Brown dwarfs are celestial objects that are too large to be called planets and too small to be called stars. They have. a mass less than 0.075 that of the sun, which is around 75 times the mass of Jupiter. Like stars, brown dwarfs are believed to form from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust. But as the cloud collapses, it does not form an object dense enough at its core to trigger a nuclear fusion. In the case of a star, hydrogen is converted into helium by nuclear fusion. This is what fuels a star and causes it to shine. Brown dwarfs, on the other hand, are not massive enough to ignite fusion. Hence, they are also called ‘failed stars’.

Dimmer and cooler than stars, brown dwarfs are elusive and hard to find. Infrared sky surveys and other techniques have, however, helped scientists detect hundreds of them.

They are believed to be as common as stars in the Universe. Some of them are companions to stars and many are isolated objects.

First discovered in 1995, brown dwarfs were hypothesized in 1963 by American astronomer Shiv Kumar. Despite their name, brown dwarfs are not brown. They appear from deep red to magenta, depending on their temperature.

Picture Credit : Google 

Discovered on August 28, 1789, Enceladus is a natural satellite of Saturn. This moon, which remained in relative obscurity for nearly 200 years, is now one of the most scientifically interesting destinations in our solar system.

The possibility of worlds other than our own Earth where life could exist has enthralled us for a long time. Often seen in the realm of science fiction, we might be inching ever so closer to it in reality as scientists have identified a handful of worlds that have some of the ingredients needed for life. One of them is Enceladus, an icy moon that is the brightest in the solar system.

Enceladus was discovered on August 28, 1789 by British astronomer William Herschel, more popular for discovering the planet Uranus. Little is known about how William went about it and made his discovery.

A dwarf named after a giant

What we do know, however, is that it was William's son, John Herschel, who gave the moon its name Enceladus, after the giant Enceladus of Greek mythology. In his 1847 publication Results of Astronomical Observation made at the Cape of Good Hope, John suggested names for the first seven moons of Saturn that had been discovered, including Enceladus. He picked these particular names as Saturn, known in Greek mythology as Cronus, was the leader of the Titans.

For nearly two centuries, very little was known about Enceladus. That changed in the 1980s, when the U.S. spacecrafts Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flew by the moon, capturing images. The pictures indicated that the icy surface of this small moon is very smooth in some places and bright white all over.

Enceladus, in fact, is the most reflective body in the solar system. Scientists, however, didn't know why this was the case for a few more decades. Enceladus reflective capability implies that it reflects almost all the sunlight that strikes it, leading to extremely cold surface temperatures, of the order of -200 degree Celsius.

E ring and tiger stripes

Shortly after NASA's Cassini spacecraft began studying Saturn's system in 2004, Enceladus started revealing its secrets. By spending over a decade in the vicinity of the small moon, including flybys as close as 50 km, Cassini was able to unearth a wealth of information about Enceladus.

Cassini discovered that icy water particles and gas gush from the moon's surface at about 400 metres per second. These continuous eruptions create a halo of fine dust around the moon, which supplies material for Saturn's E ring. While a small fraction of this remains in the ring, the remaining falls like snow back onto the moon's surface, thereby making it bright white. Scientists informally call the warm fractures on Enceladus' crust from which the water jets come from as "tiger stripes".

By measuring the moon's slight wobble as it orbits Saturn and from gravity measurements based on the Doppler effect, scientists were able to determine that these jets were being supplied by a global ocean inside the moon. As this ocean supplies the jet, which in turn produces Saturn's E ring, it follows that studying material from the E ring is akin to studying Enceladus' ocean.

While the E ring is mostly made of ice droplets, there is also the presence of nanograins of silica that can be generated only where liquid water and rock interact at temperatures above 90 degrees Celsius. Along with other evidence that has been gathered, this suggests the existence of hydrothermal vents deep beneath this moon's shell, similar to those on the Earth's ocean floor.

Orbital resonance

Enceladus takes 33 hours for its trip around Saturn, which is nearly half of the time taken by the more distant moon Dione. Enceladus is thus trapped in an orbital resonance with Dione, whose gravity stretches Enceladus' orbit into an elliptical shape. This means that Enceladus is sometimes closer to Saturn and at other times farther leading to tidal heating within the moon.

Running just over 500 km across, Enceladus is small enough to fit within the Indian State of Maharashtra, which runs around 700 km north-south and 800 km east-west. What it lacks in size it more than makes up for in stature, as Enceladus has a global ocean, unique chemistry, and internal heat. All this means that even though we still have plenty of data about the moon to pore over, explorers will eventually plan a return to Enceladus to learn more of its secrets.

Picture Credit : Google 

On August 22, 1993, just days before the Mars Observer spacecraft was to enter orbit around Mars, it lost contact with the bases here on Earth. The $400 million spacecraft with an estimated overall project cost of $1 billion was designed to study and photograph the Martian surface, but ended in failure.

Following the success of the Mariner programme in the 1960s and early 70s, the Viking programme was the U.S.'s next foray towards our neighbouring planet, Mars. After the probes Viking 1 and Viking 2 successfully landed on the red planet in 1976, over a decade went by before America's next mission to Mars. That came in the way of the Mars Observer, which was launched in 1992 and had things going well until its ill-fated end.

The mid-1980s saw a high priority mission to Mars being planned to act and expand on the information already assimilated by the Viking programme. With the preliminary mission goals of studying and taking high-resolution photographs of the Martian surface, the Mars Observer spacecraft was initially to be launched in 1990, before being rescheduled to 1992.

Based on Earth-orbiting spacecraft

Based on a commercial Earth-orbiting communications satellite that had been converted into an orbiter for Mars, the spacecraft was built at a cost of $400 million. The payload was made up of a variety of instruments that included a Gamma Ray Spectrometer (GRS), Pressure Modulator Infrared Radiometer (PMIRR), Thermal Emissions Spectrometer (TES), Mars Observer Camera (MOC), and Mars Balloon Relay (MBR) among others.

The specific objectives of the mission were to find out the elemental characteristics of the Martian surface: defining Mars topography and gravitational field: establishing the nature of Mars magnetic field finding out the distribution and sources of dust and volatile material over a seasonal cycle: and exploring the Martian abmosphere. The MBR was designed to receive information from the planned Mars Balloon Experiment to be carried by a Russian mission for retransmission back to Earth.

Contact lost

The Mars Observer was expected to achieve all this by orbiting the planet for one Martian year (687 Earth days), giving it a chance to observe the planet through the different seasons. The science instruments in the payload were thus designed to study the geology, climate, and geophysics of Mars.

Following a successful launch on September 25, 1992, Mars Observer was scheduled to perform an orbital insertion manoeuvre 11 months later on August 24, 1993. Just days before it, however, on August 22, 1993, communication was lost with the spacecraft even as it was preparing to enter orbit.

When the Mars Observer failed to respond to messages radioed by the ground controllers here on Earth, further efforts to communicate were made-once every 20 minutes. Even though they were met with silence, further attempts were made, less regularly, until the mission was declared a loss on September 27, 1993 and no further attempts to contact were made after that

Propulsion system failure

In 1994, an independent board from the Naval Research Laboratory announced their findings regarding the failure. They suggested that the most probable cause of the communications failure must be a rupture of the fuel pressurisation tank in the propulsion system of the spacecraft

Regardless of what the reason was, an estimated cost of $1 billion, which included the price of the spacecraft along with the costs of space shuttle launching and processing of scientific data was lost. While the science instruments were reflown on two other orbiters, Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey, there is no telling if Mars Observer followed the automatic programming to go into Mars orbit flew by the planet, or even if it continues to operate.

Picture Credit : Google 

On May 5, 1961, barely three weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's historic orbit of the Earth, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard waited, strapped into the Freedom 7 spacecraft. He would become the first American in space. What NASA officials hadn't anticipated was that Shepard would have to endure five hours of delay cocooned in his shiny silver spacesuit before his 15-minute orbit.

"Man, I got to pee," he frantically radioed launch control. Allowing Shepard to urinate in his suit would destroy the medical sensors he was wired with, but eventually launch control had no option but to let him go. Shepard had to suffer the discomfort of a wet suit till the cooling system inside evaporated the liquid.

Early efforts

NASA hadn't solved the problem entirely even in 1963 when Gordon Cooper blasted off on the last Project Mercury flight. There was a urine collection device inside the suit, but the urine leaked out of the bag and the droplets seeped into the electronics, leading to a systems failure towards the end of the mission.

If wayward pee was a problem, think of what its twin, poop, could do in the cramped quarters of a spacecraft!

The Gemini project was launched to prepare men for the Apollo moon mission. In 1965, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman spent 14 days flying in Gemini 7, the longest manned mission at the time. They had to poop into a cylindrical plastic bag and add a substance to kill the bacteria and odours. Though the pee could be sent out directly into space through a valve-operated hose, the poo bags had to be stored in the craft till they landed.

By the time the Apollo missions came around, the system hadn't improved much. The Moon men's toilet ordeal lasted 45 minutes to an hour. They had to undress completely in a corner of the spacecraft and stick a faecal collection bag to their bottom. Low gravity meant that the poop wouldn't fall down. The astronauts had to manually help it along with a finger cot, a glove-like covering for a single finger. They also had to knead a germicide into it to prevent the growth of gas-forming bacteria that could cause the bags to explode.

Hit and miss

Accidents did happen. Houston once heard the commander of the 1969 Apollo 10 mission Tom Stafford say, "Give me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating through the air!"

On the first Space Shuttle mission in 1981, astronauts had to unclog smelly blocked toilets. Frozen urine ejected from the Russian Mir space station, damaged the station's solar panels over time, reducing their effectiveness by around 40%.

Today, on the International Space Station (ISS), each astronaut is given his or her own funnel for peeing. It attaches to a hose. Urine is sent through a filtration system and recycled into drinking water. There is a proper sit down toilet for more serious business. The waste is sucked into a canister, which is stored and later shot back towards Earth along with other trash, where it burns up in the atmosphere.

Did you know?

Astronauts go through 'positional training' on Earth to perfect their aim since the toilet on the ISS has a narrow opening. The mock toilet has a camera at the bottom. Astronauts don't actually go, but watch a video screen in front of them to check that their alignment is spot on. The toilet costs millions of dollars, so missing the target is not an option.

 During a spacewalk or an EVA (extravehicular activity), astronauts wear a maximum absorbency garment, which is essentially a large diaper.

NASA'S 2020 Lunar Loo Challenge, which invited designs from the public for compact toilets that would work well in both microgravity and lunar gravity received tremendous response. The Artemis program plans to land a man and the first woman on the Moon by 2024.

Picture Credit :Google 

If we talk about ringed planets, more often than not every one of us will be talking about Saturn. This, despite the fact that all four giants in our solar system Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune - in fact have rings.

This is likely because Saturn has spectacular rings. While the rings of Jupiter and Neptune are flimsy and difficult to view with stargazing instruments traditionally used, the rings of Uranus aren't as large as that of Saturn's.

As Jupiter is bigger than Saturn, it ought to have rings that are larger and more spectacular than that of its neighbour. As this isn't the case, scientists from UC Riverside decided to investigate it further. Their results were accepted by the Planetary Science journal and are available online.

Dynamic simulation

A dynamic computer simulation was run to try and understand the reason why Jupiter's rings look the way they do. The simulation accounted for Jupiter's orbit, the orbits of Jupiter's four main moons, and information regarding the time it takes for rings to form.

The rings of Saturn are largely made of ice, some of which may have come from comets also largely made of ice. When moons are massive, their gravity can either clear the ice out of the planet's orbit, or change the ice's orbit such that it collides with the moons.

Massive moons

The Galilean moons of Jupiter Ganymede, Callisto, lo, and Europa- are all large moons. Ganymede, in fact, is the largest moon in our solar system. The four main massive moons of Jupiter would thus destroy any large rings that might form around the planet. This also means that Jupiter is unlikely to have had large. spectacular rings at any time in the past as well.

Ring systems, apart from being beautiful, help us understand the history of a planet. They offer evidence of collisions with moons or comets, indicating the type of event that might have led to their formation. The researchers next plan to use the simulations to study the rings of Uranus to find out what the lifetime of those rings might be.

Picture Credit : Google 

On August 8, 2007, space shuttle Endeavour’s STS-118 mission was successfully launched. Among the crew members was Barbara Morgan, the first teacher to travel into space. Barbara Morgan, in full Barbara Radding Morgan, (born Nov. 28, 1951, Fresno, Calif., U.S.), American teacher and astronaut, the first teacher to travel into space. Morgan earned a B.A. in human biology from Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1973.

Among the many new things during the COVID-19 pandemic was the school classroom, or the lack of it. During the height of the pandemic in the last two years, students were often seen attending virtual classrooms from homes with the teachers conducting the classes from their houses.

A group of students in the U.S. experienced something similar 15 years ago. Only that their teacher, Barbara Morgan wasn't teaching virtually from the comfort of her home. Morgan was the first teacher to travel into space and she did do some teaching while in space!

Born in November 1951 in Fresno, California, Morgan obtained a B.A. in human biology from Stanford University in 1973. Having received her teaching credentials by the following year, she began her teaching career in 1974 in Arlee, Montana, teaching remedial reading and maths.

She taught remedial reading, maths, and second grade in McCall, Idaho from 1975-78, before heading to Quito in Ecuador to teach English and science to third graders for a year. Following her return to the U.S., she returned to McCall, Idaho, where she taught second through fourth grades at McCall-Donnelly Elementary School until 1998.

Teacher in Space

Morgan's tryst with space began in July 1985 when she was selected as the backup candidate for NASA's Teacher in Space programme. As the backup to American teacher Christa McAuliffe, Morgan spent the time from September 1985 to January 1986 attending various training sessions at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. After McAuliffe and the rest of the crew died in the 1986 Challenger disaster, Morgan replaced McAuliffe as the Teacher in Space designee and worked with NASA's education division.

Morgan reported to the Johnson Space Center in August 1998 after being selected by NASA as a mission specialist and NASA's first educator astronaut. Even though Morgan didn't participate in the Educator Astronaut Project, the successor to the Teacher in Space programme, NASA gave her the honour of being its first educator astronaut.

Following two years of training and evaluation, Morgan was assigned technical duties. She worked in mission control as a communicator with in-orbit crews and also served with the robotics branch of the astronaut office.

Further delay

Even though she was assigned as a mission specialist to the crew of STS-118 in 2002 and was expected to fly the next year, it was delayed for a number of years following the 2003 Columbia disaster. It was on August 8, 2007 that Morgan finally flew into space on the space shuttle Endeavour on STS-118.

The STS-118 was primarily an assembly-and-repair trip to the International Space Station (ISS). The crew were successfully able to add a truss segment, a new gyroscope, and external spare parts platform to the ISS. Morgan served as loadmaster, shuttle and station robotic arm operator, and also provided support during the spacewalks. All this, in addition to being an educator.

Answers from space

For the first time in human history, school children enjoyed lessons from space, conducted by Morgan. Apart from speaking to the students while in space, she also fielded questions. For one question from a student on how fast a baseball will go in space, she even had another astronaut Clay Anderson throw the ball slowly before floating over to catch it himself. While that opened up the opportunity of playing ball with yourself while in space, she also informed the student that the ball can be thrown fast, but it is avoided in order to not cause any damage to the craft and the equipment on board.

Following the first lessons from space, the Endeavour returned to Earth on August 21 after travelling 5.3 million miles in space. Having carried 5,000 pounds of equipment and supplies to the ISS, it returned with 4,000 pounds worth of scientific materials and used equipment.

As for Morgan, she retired from NASA in 2008 to become the distinguished educator in residence at Boise State University. A post created exclusively for her, it entailed a dual appointment to the colleges of engineering and education. As someone who strongly believes that teachers are learners, she continues to teach and learn, be it from space, or here on Earth.

Picture Credit : Google 

Scientists have achieved yet another historic feat by discovering a dormant black hole. It is for the first time that a dormant stellar-mass black hole orbiting a star has been detected in a nearby galaxy.

This new black hole is nine times the mass of the Sun and revolves around a blue star in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. Researchers have termed it "the first to be unambiguously detected outside our galaxy". The binary system has been christened VFTS243. This finding is cardinal because it will help us get more insights into what happens during the death of a star and how black hole pairs are formed.

Astrophysicist and the lead author of the new study Tomer Shenar remarked that they have found a 'needle in a haystack. The study was published in the Nature Astronomy journal.

How it was detected

In a binary system, two stars revolve around each other and when a star dies, it will lead to a black hole in orbit with the other companion star. Scientists detect black holes from the X-ray radiation they emit as they feed on the companion star.

In this case, the scientists found a massive star orbiting something that couldn't be observed.

Following further studies, scientists found out that it was a dormant black hole.

The stellar mass black holes are formed when a massive star dies and collapses in a supernovae explosion. But strangely, in this particular case, the star that led to the formation of the black hole in VFTS 243 went away without any explosion and literally vanished into a black hole. Scientists have termed it a direct-collapse scenario. This has led scientists to understand that all stars do not end their lives in supernova explosions and it gives insight into how black hole pairs are formed.

What is a Black Hole?

A black hole is a celestial body that has an immensely huge gravitational pull, so huge that nothing escapes it. Not even light can escape it! The black hole grows by accumulating matter that falls in it. An image of a black hole was captured for the first time in 2019.

What is the size of a Black Hole?

The tiniest black hole can be as tiny as an atom but it can have the mass of a huge mountain. The other is the stellar black hole and these can have a mass of more than 20 solar masses, which is 20 times more mass than our sun. And the biggest black holes are christened supermassive. Sagittarius A is a supermassive black hole.

How are Black Holes formed?

Black holes are formed at the end of the life of a big star. When a massive star, say one having more than 20 solar masses, collapses after its nuclear fuel depletes, it will collapse onto itself and become a black hole. This collapse leads to a supernova and a part of the star gets blown off into space.

So will our Sun turn into a Black Hole?

The Sun cannot turn into a black hole. For us, the Sun is big, but on a celestial scale, it is too small to collapse into a black hole! So, our Sun will only turn into a white dwarf.

Picture Credit : Google 

Vega became the first star other than our sun to be photographed. Visible in the summer sky of the northern hemisphere, Vega is a bright star located about 25 light years from our Earth. On July 16-17, 1850, The days when we could look up to see star-studded skies feel like they are numbered. Especially in cities, as the light pollution makes it impossible for us to enjoy the celestial show. Some stars, however, shine bright enough such that they can be seen even on a moonlit night or from light-polluted cities.

Vega is one such star visible in the summer sky of the northern hemisphere. The brightest star in the constellation Lyra, it is also known as Alpha Lyrae. The fifth-brightest star visible from Earth, it is also among the closest of all bright stars at about 25 light years away.

The Summer Triangle

Along with two other stars - the distant Deneb and the fast-spinning Altair-the blue-white Vega forms an asterism known as the Summer Triangle. These three stars are usually the first to light up the eastern half of the sky after sunset.

Beginning around June and until the end of the year the Summer Triangle pattern can be discerned in the evening every day. Vega, which sinks below the horizon for just seven hours each day, can actually be seen on any day of the year. At mid-northern latitudes on midsummer nights, Vega is usually directly overhead.

The blue-white light of Vega is so bright that it has been observed through the centuries. Be it the Hindus, Chinese, or the Polynesians, the star features prominently in many ancient cultures. Its name, meanwhile, comes from the Arabic word wagi, which means "falling" or "swooping"

First to be photographed

The brightness has meant that Vega has remained relevant in modern times as well, notching up a number of firsts. The first of those firsts came in 1850, when Vega became the first star to be photographed, other than our sun.

On July 16-17, 1850, a 15-inch (38 cm) refractor at the Harvard College Observatory was employed to capture it. Harvard's first astronomer, William Cranch Bond, had been dabbling with celestial photography at the behest of John Adams Whipple, an American inventor and photographer. Using the daguerreotype process, the duo achieved a 90-second exposure of Vega that yielded the first photograph of a star other than our own. Bond and Whipple, in fact, kept at it and their daguerreotype of the moon the next year created quite a stir at the international exhibition held in London's Crystal Palace.

Spectrum of a star

A couple of decades later, Vega was again central to another first. Henry Draper, an American doctor and amateur astronomer, was a pioneer in astrophotography. He chose Vega as his subject when he created the first spectrographic image of the star in 1872. Breaking down Vega's light to reveal the various elements making up the star, Draper had taken the first spectrum of a star other than our sun.

Late in the 1990s, Vega rose to prominence once again after American astronomer Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" was made into a Hollywood movie. As the movie showed an astronomer discovering a signal appearing to come from Vega while searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, the star captured popular imagination.

Vega's blue-white light indicates surface temperatures of about 9,400 degree Celsius, much hotter than that of our sun (4,000 degree Celsius). Vega's diameter is nearly 2.5 times that of the sun, while its mass is also more than twice that of our sun.

Vega is only about 450 million years old, making it a youngster when compared to our sun, which is 4.6 billion years old. Despite Vega being a 10th of the sun's age, both stars are classified as middle-aged as they are halfway through their respective lives. This means that while our sun will run out of fuel only after another 5 billion years, Vega will burn for only another half-a-billion years.

Picture Credit : Google 

A U.S. start up is behind Terran 1, and could be a pioneering effort in the still-nascent commercial space industry.

Relativity Space is a Los Angeles aerospace start-up that builds rockets using advanced 3D printing technology.

Its debut rocket, the Terran 1, has completed pre-launch testing, ahead of a planned launch window beginning June 30. Originally intended to be ready by 2020, the project is running about 18 months behind schedule. The first rocket launch will carry no cargo and is purely a test flight. If successful, a second flight will carry a NASA payload-it is capable of lifting up to one tonne into low Earth orbit.

The Terran 1 is an intended stepping stone on the way to realising the Terran R, a reusable rocket currently under development, capable of carrying 20 times the cargo of the Terran 1, when it launches in 2024. In order to 3D-print large components, Relativity Space has created "Stargate" a system that it claims is the world's largest 3D printer of metals. It uses existing welding technology to melt metal wire, layer by layer, into precise and complex structures that have minimal joints and parts. The company says it will eventually be able to build an entire rocket (95% of which is 3D-printed) in two months. Traditional methods of construction take 24 months and use 100 times as many parts.

Picture Credit : Google 

On June 18, 1983, Sally K. Ride was onboard the space shuttle Challenger for the STS-7 mission, thereby becoming the first American woman to go into space. Apart from making two space flights, Ride championed the cause of science education for children.

The first decades of space exploration was largely dominated by two countries the US and the Soviet Union This period is even referred to as the Space Race as the two Cold War adversaries pitted themselves: against each other to achieve superior spaceflight capabilities.

While the two countries were neck and neck in most aspects. the Soviets sent a woman to space much before the US. Even though Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in June 1963, it was another 20 years before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space

Urged to explore

Ride was the older of two daughters born  to Carol Joyce Ride and Dale Ride. Even though her mother was a counsellor and her father a professor of political science. Ride credits them for fostering her interest in science by enabling her to explore from a very young age.

An athletic teenager, Ride loved sports such as tennis, running, volleyball, and softball. In fact, she attended Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles on a partial tennis scholarship. She even tried her luck in professional tennis, before returning to California to attend Stanford University.

By 1973, Ride not only had a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics, but had also obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. She got her Master of Science degree in 1975 and obtained her Ph.D. in Physics by 1978

Restriction removed

Having restricted astronaut qualification to men for decades,  NASA expanded astronaut selection with the advent of the space shuttle from only pilots to engineers and scientists, opening the doorway for women finally. Having seen an ad in a newspaper inviting women to apply for the astronaut programme Ride decided to give it a shot

Out of more than 8,000 applications, Ride became one of six women who were chosen as an astronaut candidate in January 1978. Spaceflight training began soon after and it included parachute jumping, water survival, weightlessness, radio communications, and navigation, among others. She was also involved in developing the robot arm used to deploy and retrieve satellites.

Ride served as part of the ground-support crew for STS-2 and STS-3 missions in November 1981 and March 1982. In April 1982, NASA announced that Ride would be part of the STS-7 crew, serving as a mission specialist in a five-member crew.

First American woman in space

On June 18, 1983, Ride became the first American woman in space. By the time the STS-7 mission was completed and the space shuttle Challenger returned to Earth on June 24, they had launched communications satellites for Canada and Indonesia. As an expert in the use of the shuttle's robotic arm, Ride also helped deploy and retrieve a satellite in space using the robot arm.

Ride created history once again when she became the first American woman to travel to space a second time as part of the STS-41G in October 1984. During this nine-day mission, Ride employed the shuttle's robotic arm to remove ice from the shuttle's exterior and to also readjust a radar antenna. There could have even been a third, as she was supposed to join STS-61M, but that mission was cancelled following the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Even after her days of space travel were over, Ride was actively involved in influencing the space programme. When accident investigation boards were set up in response to two shuttle tragedies - Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 Ride was a part of them both.

Picture Credit : Google 

Space junk, or space debris, is any piece of machinery or debris left by humans in space.

It can refer to big objects such as dead satellites that have failed or been left in orbit at the end of their mission. It can also refer to smaller things, like bits of debris or paint flecks that have fallen off a rocket.

Some human-made junk has been left on the Moon, too.

How much space junk is there?

While there are about 2,000 active satellites orbiting Earth at the moment, there are also 3,000 dead ones littering space. What's more, there are around 34,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 centimetres in size and millions of smaller pieces that could nonetheless prove disastrous if they hit something else.

How does space junk get into space?

All space junk is the result of us launching objects from Earth, and it remains in orbit until it re-enters the atmosphere.

Some objects in lower orbits of a few hundred kilometres can return quickly. They often re-enter the atmosphere after a few years and, for the most part, they'll burn up - so they don't reach the ground. But debris or satellites left at higher altitudes of 36,000 kilometres - where communications and weather satellites are often placed in geostationary orbits - can continue to circle Earth for hundreds or even thousands of years.

What risks does space junk pose to space exploration?

Fortunately, at the moment, space junk doesn't pose a huge risk to our exploration efforts. The biggest danger it poses is to other satellites in orbit.

These satellites have to move out of the way of all this incoming space junk to make sure they don't get hit and potentially damaged or destroyed.

In total, across all satellites, hundreds of collision avoidance manoeuvres are performed every year, including by the International Space Station (ISS), where astronauts live.

Space junk in numbers

2,000 active satellites in Earth's orbit

3,000 dead satellites in Earth's orbit

34,000 pieces of space junk larger than 10 centimetres

128 million pieces of space junk larger than 1 millimetre

One in 10,000: risk of collision that will require debris avoidance manoeuvres

25 debris avoidance manoeuvres by the ISS since 1999

How can we clean up space junk?

The United Nations ask that all companies remove their satellites from orbit within 25 years after the end of their mission. This is tricky to enforce, though, because satellites can (and often do) fail. To tackle this problem, several companies around the world have come up with novel solutions.

These include removing dead satellites from orbit and dragging them back into the atmosphere, where they will burn up. Ways we could do this include using a harpoon to grab a satellite, catching it in a huge net, using magnets to grab it, or even firing lasers to heat up the satellite, increasing its atmospheric drag so that it falls out of orbit.

Credit :  Natural History Museam

Picture Credit : Google 

 

Have you ever looked up at our moon and wondered if it was possible to grow plants there? According to a new study published in Communications Biology, the answer is maybe. Success in growing a plant on the moon, it seems, depends on where exactly the planting is done.

The research, performed by a team of two horticulturists and one geologist from the University of Florida, showed for the first time that plants could be grown in lunar soil. The results are an important step towards humanity's ambitions of making long-term stays on the moon possible.

Third-time lucky

The research has been in the making for a long time. This was the third time that these scientists had applied to NASA over the last 11 years for samples of soil brought back to the Earth by any or all of the six Apollo landing missions. Having been declined on the first two instances, the researchers got their wish this time around.

Probably because NASA themselves are planning longer excursions to our natural satellite, they parted with 12 grams of soil about 18 months ago. This soil was gathered by the crews of Apollos 11, 12, and 17 and were part of just 382 kg of lunar soil and rocks brought back during the Apollo missions.

The researchers chose the thale cress plant, both because of its hardiness and the fact that its genome has been fully sequenced. The planting was done in plastic plates with wells that are usually used to grow cell cultures. There were four wells apiece for each of the three Apollo missions, and they got a gram of soil each. Four more wells were used as a control, with simulated lunar soil prepared using earthly materials.

To their astonishment, researchers noticed that the seeds sprouted after two days. Regardless of whether they were growing in a lunar sample or in the control, they looked the same for the first six days. Differences began to emerge after that as the plants grown in lunar soil showed stress, developed slowly, and ended up being stunted.

Geological age factor

There were also differences within the lunar samples as the Apollo 11 plans grew most poorly, followed by Apollo 12 and then Apollo 17. The researchers concluded that the reason for this has to do with the age of the soil. While the samples brought back by Apollo 11 are older geologically than those brought back by Apollo 12, the samples from Apollo 17 are most recent in geological time.

The results from this research are very important as it helps us develop food sources for future astronauts who might live and operate in deep space for extended durations. Such plant growth research could also unlock innovations in agriculture that might allow us to grow plants under stressful conditions in places where food is scarce here on Earth.

Picture Credit : Google 

Io or Jupiter I, is the innermost and third-largest of the four Galilean moons of the planet Jupiter. Slightly larger than Earth’s moon, Io is the fourth-largest moon in the Solar System, has the highest density of any moon, the strongest surface gravity of any moon, and the lowest amount of water (by atomic ratio) of any known astronomical object in the Solar System. It was discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei and was named after the mythological character Io, a priestess of Hera who became one of Zeus's lovers.

With over 400 active volcanoes, Io is the most geologically active object in the Solar System.

 This extreme geologic activity is the result of tidal heating from friction generated within Io's interior as it is pulled between Jupiter and the other Galilean moons—Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Several volcanoes produce plumes of sulfur and sulfur dioxide that climb as high as 500 km (300 mi) above the surface. Io's surface is also dotted with more than 100 mountains that have been uplifted by extensive compression at the base of Io's silicate crust. Some of these peaks are taller than Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth's surface.  Unlike most moons in the outer Solar System, which are mostly composed of water ice, Io is primarily composed of silicate rock surrounding a molten iron or iron sulfide core. Most of Io's surface is composed of extensive plains with a frosty coating of sulfur and sulfur dioxide.

Io's volcanism is responsible for many of its unique features. Its volcanic plumes and lava flows produce large surface changes and paint the surface in various subtle shades of yellow, red, white, black, and green, largely due to allotropes and compounds of sulfur. Numerous extensive lava flows, several more than 500 km (300 mi) in length, also mark the surface. The materials produced by this volcanism make up Io's thin, patchy atmosphere and Jupiter's extensive magnetosphere. Io's volcanic ejecta also produce a large plasma torus around Jupiter.

Io played a significant role in the development of astronomy in the 17th and 18th centuries; discovered in January 1610 by Galileo Galilei, along with the other Galilean satellites, this discovery furthered the adoption of the Copernican model of the Solar System, the development of Kepler's laws of motion, and the first measurement of the speed of light. Viewed from Earth, Io remained just a point of light until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it became possible to resolve its large-scale surface features, such as the dark red polar and bright equatorial regions. In 1979, the two Voyager spacecraft revealed Io to be a geologically active world, with numerous volcanic features, large mountains, and a young surface with no obvious impact craters. The Galileo spacecraft performed several close flybys in the 1990s and early 2000s, obtaining data about Io's interior structure and surface composition. These spacecraft also revealed the relationship between Io and Jupiter's magnetosphere and the existence of a belt of high-energy radiation centered on Io's orbit. Io receives about 3,600 rem (36 Sv) of ionizing radiation per day.

Further observations have been made by Cassini–Huygens in 2000, New Horizons in 2007, and Juno since 2017, as well as from Earth-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Credit : Wikipedia 

Picture Credit : Google 

Nasa has discovered a rare and highly valuable asteroid called '16 psyche’. It was found by nasa’s hubble space telescope. The asteroid is located in our solar system’s asteroid belt between the planets of mars and jupiter.

According to a study published by the planetary science journal on monday, asteroid '16 psyche’ is located roughly 370 million kilometres (230 million miles) from the earth and measures 226 kilometres across (140 miles).

The most interesting thing about the asteroid is what it's made of. Unlike other asteroids made up of either rocks or ice, psyche is made up of metals.

One of the study's authors tracy becker said that they usually come across meteorites that have metal deposits but since psyche is made up entirely of metals, it is quite unique. 

Psyche's size and presence of metal deposits means that it could be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10,000,000,000,000,000,000), which is equivalent to ten thousand times the global economy in 2019.

Researchers used the ultraviolet spectrum data collected by the space telescope imaging spectrograph on the hubble telescope during two observations made in 2017.

The data showed them that psyche's surface could be made of pure iron but they also found that the presence of iron composition as small as 10 percent could dominate ultraviolet reports. Psyche is believed to be the dead core of a planet that might have failed during its formative stages or it could also be the result of many violent space collisions.

Nasa has already targeted the exploration of asteroid psyche with the launch of nasa discovery mission psyche, which is expected to be launched in 2022. The psyche space probe will be sent atop a spacex falcon heavy rocket and will reach the asteroid by 2026, and hopefully uncover its exact metal content and other facets.

Credit :  India times 

Picture Credit : Google