Hasta La Gadget!

Back in August of 2012, NASA successfully landed the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. The massive rover had a highly complicated system designed to bring it safely to ground inside Gale Crater. One of the primary devices used to slow the Curiosity rover’s decent to the surface of Mars was a gigantic parachute.

The giant parachute use by Curiosity was 51-feet in diameter and once Curiosity was on the ground the parachute ended up about 673 yards away from the rover. Curiosity has been taking photographs of all sorts of things on the surface of Mars ever since it landed, including its own litter. We’ve always known that Mars has an atmosphere, but that atmosphere is significantly thinner than the atmosphere on Earth.

This is why Curiosity required such a large parachute to slow its fall towards the surface of Mars. Recently, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking some interesting photographs of the parachute lying on the surface of Mars. Photographs released by NASA recently show the parachute over the course of five months. The photograph showed that between September 8, 2012 and November 30, 2012 there was some sort of major change that moved the parachute extension from the southeast inward.

Scientists also noted during the same time interval that some “dark ejecta” around the backshell that brightened indicating the deposition of airborne dust. Another significant wind event on the surface of Mars again changed how the massive parachute was laying between December 16, 2012 and January 13 of 2013. This wind event shifted the parachute to the southeast. The scientists say that while seeing the parachute move is a minor curiosity, these windy flapping events could help explain why parachutes on the surface of Mars from the Viking Landers, which landed 1976, are still visible. These wind events help to dust off the bright parachute material.

[via Discovery]

Photos show Curiosity’s parachute flapping in the Martian wind is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This ingenious website made by David Paliwoda shows how far Mars is from Earth in a metric all us Internet lovers understand: pixels. If Earth was a 100 pixels wide, how far would Mars be? To start off, the moon would be 3000 pixels away (and 27 pixels wide). Mars? More »

Today a briefing was held at Europe’s CERN laboratory which had experiment chief Samuel Ting of MIT announcing what may be the first official detection of dark matter. Ting is a Nobel-prize winning physicist and made it clear that though “more statistics” are going to be needed to be entirely certain of the results, theses findings are the most compelling evidence of dark matter yet.

Dark matter particles are what science loosely defines as invisible space-filling matter. This matter outweighs normal matter (what we’re all made of) and is suggested to exist based on astronomers observations of gravitational tugs on galaxies. To detect the existence of dark matter, a lovely Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer detector was installed aboard the International Space Station approximately two years ago.

The announcement today suggests that the AMS detector has shown evidence of cosmic rays colliding with dark matter particles across the universe. Over the past 18 months, the AMS detector has recorded a massive 25 billion cosmic ray signals – from this, Ting says, dark matter may have been detected. As each cosmic ray collides with dark matter, it throws off antimatter particles – positrons – recorded by the AMS.

[image above via HubbleSite]

Unfortunately as this is indeed a scientific experiment, we won’t have enough certainty of the results to say, without a scientific doubt, that dark matter has been detected without further tests. According to Ting, over the next two decades the experiment should – if everything goes smoothly – produce enough data that we’ll be able to say for sure whether or not they’ve actually found dark matter.

[via USA Today]

Dark Matter detection suggested aboard ISS is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The moon known as Titan should ring a bell for you if you’re interested in the possibility of life on planets other than our own. Saturn’s yellow moon has been the subject of life-sustaining chatter for some time now, the most recent discovery about it having been found in an experiment done right here on Earth. Down at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, an experiment has been done that suggests life in a whole new region before suspected to be devoid of it.

The experiment at hand simulated the atmosphere of Titan and suggested that complex organic chemistry extends lower into the atmosphere than science previously suspected. These strands are such that the building blocks of life could spring forth – these results point toward prebiotic materials swimming around an area of this moon that makes this heavenly body exciting all over again.

“Scientists previously thought that as we got closer to the surface of Titan, the moon’s atmospheric chemistry was basically inert and dull. Our experiment shows that’s not true. The same kind of light that drives biological chemistry on Earth’s surface could also drive chemistry on Titan, even though Titan receives far less light from the sun and is much colder. Titan is not a sleeping giant in the lower atmosphere, but at least half awake in its chemical activity.” – Murthy Gudipati, lead author of the paper on this subject published at JPL.

The paper published on these findings can be found in Nature Communications this week. Co-author Mark Allen, principal investigator of the JPL Titan team that is a part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, headquartered at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, had a bit to say as well.

“We’ve known that Titan’s upper atmosphere is hospitable to the formation of complex organic molecules. Now we know that sunlight in the Titan lower atmosphere can kick-start more complex organic chemistry in liquids and solids rather than just in gases.” – Allen

The result of the experiments conducted by this team show a much larger volume in the bits of Titan’s atmosphere involved in the production of more complex organic chemicals than previously suspected. The full team of researchers involved on this project included Ronen Jacovi, a NASA postdoctoral fellow from Israel; Isabelle Couturier of the University of Provence, Marseille, France; and Antti Lignell, a Finnish Academy of Science postdoctoral fellow from Helsinki at JPL.

NOTE: Straight from NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, the image above is a “true color snapshot” from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft of Titan itself!

[via Michael Interbartolo]

Saturn’s moon Titan reveals even more life-sustaining possibilities is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Astronomers at the European Space Agency have watched a hitherto-dormant black hole wake and gorge upon a nearby substellar object the size of a “super Jupiter”, a months-long feasting that consumed a tenth of its mass. The sudden flaring of the black hole – believed to have a mass around 300,000 times that of our Sun – came after several decades of inactivity, the ESA said, but is a timely example of the appetite the super-dense anomalies can have. Scientists expect a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way to flare in a similar way, potentially as soon as this year.

This particular observation occurred in galaxy NGC 4845, roughly 47 million light years away from Earth, and caught the attention of astronomers by virtue of its extreme X-ray flaring. The XMM-Newton worked with the INTEGRAL space observatory, NASA’s Swift, and Japan’s MAXI X-ray monitors to pinpoint the cause.

Although NGC 4845 had never before been a source of high-energy output, that rapidly changed over the course of several months. At its maximum, the ESA says, the output made the galaxy brighter by a factor of a 1,000 in January 2011.

The cause of all that brightness was the vast appetite of a supermassive black hole, which awoke unexpectedly to consume great quantities of mass from an orbiting object. Exact figures on the size of the object are unknown, though there are estimates that it could be anywhere from 14-30x the mass of Jupiter, potentially putting it on a par, mass-wise, with a brown dwarf. Alternatively, it could have been significantly smaller – a few times that of Jupiter – making it more like a large gas giant.

Either way, the black hole at NGC 4845 took a big, prolonged bite out of it. Over a roughly 2-3 month period, ESA says, the external layers – or roughly 10-percent of the overall mass – were peeled away and consumed, as per this short animation from the agency:

“This is the first time where we have seen the disruption of a substellar object by a black hole” Roland Walter of the Observatory of Geneva, Switzerland, and co-author of a paper detailing the incident, said. What remains is “a denser core” that has been “left orbiting the black hole.”

Supermassive black hole wakes to feast on giant planet as astronomers watch is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.