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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Feb 6, 2024
NGC 1566: A Spiral Galaxy from Webb and Hubble
What's different about this galaxy? Very little, which makes the Spanish Dancer galaxy, NGC 1566, one of the most typical and photogenic spirals on the sky. There is something different about this galaxy image, though, because it is a diagonal combination of two images: one by the Hubble Space Telescope on the upper left, and the other by the James Webb Space Telescope on the lower right. The Hubble image was taken in ultraviolet light and highlights the locations of bright blue stars and dark dust along the galaxy's impressive spiral arms. In contrast, the Webb image was taken in infrared light and highlights where the same dust emits more light than it absorbed. In the rollover image, the other two sides of these images are revealed. Blinking between the two images shows which stars are particularly hot because they glow brighter in ultraviolet light, and the difference between seemingly empty space and infrared-glowing dust.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
1st look at asteroid Bennu samples suggests space rock may even be 'a fragment of an ancient ocean world'
Feb 6, 2024
Scientists are now inspecting snagged, bagged and tagged bits and pieces from asteroid Bennu, the cosmic mother lode delivered by NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security ā Regolith Explorer mission.
Known in acronymic astro-speak as OSIRIS-REx, that seven-year-long voyage brought home the goods via a sample return canister that came to full stop on Sept. 24, 2023, parachuting into a remote stretch of the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. Those specimens from afar are believed to contain the leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
Space.com caught up with two leading scientists now engaged in extracting what those darkish asteroid particles are illuminating, sorting out how these materials exported from Bennu came to be. But also what insights they hold for the origin of the worlds within our solar system, including Earth.
The scene is the University of Arizona's Kuiper-Arizona Laboratory for Astromaterials Analysis. Researchers there are using instruments to dig into what the OSIRIS-REx collectibles are telling them, right down to the atomic scale.
For a start, University of Arizona scientists received 200 milligrams ā roughly seven-thousandths of an ounce ā of the asteroid Bennu sample for analysis.
"We have over a 1,000 particles that are greater than half-a-millimeter, 28 particles that are greater than a centimeter, and the biggest particle is 3.5 centimeters," said University of Arizona's Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx. "So a great collection full of really large stones."
Bennu samples contain plentiful amounts of water locked up in minerals like clays and are also rich in carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous. OSIRIS-REx samples represent the largest pristine reservoir of such material on Earth.
"We're going to be busy for a long, long time," Lauretta told Space.com. "This is an enormous amount of sample for us," he said, with specimens of Bennu now also under study all over the globe.
What's being found is to be detailed at next month's 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held in The Woodlands, Texas. Over 70 abstracts of science output have been submitted to that prestigious meeting, Lauretta said. "Starting in March that's all going to be released out to the world. So the team is working furiously," he said.
One early finding is that the asteroid material under inspection looks "distinct and different than anything else in our meteorite collection isotopically, which is exciting," said Lauretta. "There's a whole realm of material that we never get access to if we just rely on meteorites," Lauretta added.
Most meteorites that endure their fiery fall through Earth's atmosphere and are recovered are bits of asteroids. But pinpointing the space rock from which they originated is not easily done.
OSIRIS-REx samples have a phosphate crust never seen before in meteorites, Lauretta said. These high concentrations of phosphate have been detected in extraterrestrial ocean worlds, he said.
For instance, Saturn's moon Enceladus contains phosphates, a key building block of life and at levels much higher than Earth's oceans.
"Asteroid Bennu may be a fragment of an ancient ocean world. That's still highly speculative. But it's the best lead I have right now to explain the origin of that material," Lauretta said.
Unraveling the history of asteroid Bennu is a surreal undertaking, said Thomas Zega, a professor at the university's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and scientific director at the school's Kuiper-Arizona Laboratory for Astromaterials Analysis.
Zega points to the decades that bookended the OSIRIS-REx mission, from a fleshed-out proposal to having the asteroid samples under extreme study in the laboratory.
"Honestly, seldom does a day go by where I don't consider myself incredibly fortunate to actually do this for a living," Zega told Space.com. "I pinch myself. It's a blessing."
By any definition the OSIRIS-REx mission has been a phenomenal success, Zega added, "and now being able to use some of the most sophisticated analytical tools on the planet to measure the samples, it's quite remarkable."
Missions like OSIRIS-REx, aside from teaching scientists about the origins of Bennu, Zega noted, "they really do help us connect the dots between other meteorites we have in our terrestrial collections," he said, "and perhaps the asteroids they come from in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter."
https://www.space.com/asteroid-bennu-osiris-rex-samples-1st-look-surprises
879 days! Russian cosmonaut breaks record for total time spent in space
Feb 6, 2024
The spaceflight record books have just been rewritten.
Over the weekend, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set a new mark for most total days spent off Earth, eclipsing the 878 days, 11 hours and 30 minutes of his countryman Gennady Padalka, according to Russia's state-run TASS news agency.
Kononenko launched to the International Space Station (ISS) last September for a stay that could last a full year, so he will continue to add to his newly set record for a while yet.
"It is expected that Oleg Kononenko will reach a total of 1,000 days in space on June 5, 2024 at 00:00:20 Moscow time. And upon completion of the annual expedition (September 23, 2024), [his] total flight time will be 1,110 days," Russia's federal space agency Roscosmos wrote in a post on Telegram. (The original post is in Russian; translation by Google.)
Soviet and Russian cosmonauts dominate the spaceflight-duration record book. They hold the top eight slots on the most-total-time-in-space list, for example. Peggy Whitson, whose 675 days off Earth are the most by a NASA astronaut, is number nine overall.
And cosmonaut Valery Polyakov holds the single-flight duration record, spending nearly 438 consecutive days aboard Russia's Mir space station from January 1994 to March 1995.
The top American on that list is Frank Rubio, who recently spent 371 days aboard the ISS after his original ride home, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, sprang a leak in orbit and had to be replaced.
The current mission is Kononenko's fifth spaceflight. He's currently serving as a flight engineer on the orbiting lab's Expedition 70, but he's scheduled to take the station's reins later this month, when current commander Andreas Mogenson comes back to Earth with the rest of SpaceX's Crew-7 mission.
The Crew-7 quartet will be replaced by the four astronauts of Crew-8, which is scheduled to lift off on Feb. 22 from Florida's Space Coast.
https://www.space.com/cosmonaut-oleg-kononenko-breaks-record-time-in-space
NASA's Juno Mission Makes Closest Flyby Past Io
FEBRUARY 5, 2024
NASAās Juno mission has made its closest approach yet to Io, Jupiterās innermost Galilean moon, passing within 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) of the surface on February 3rd. These were the closest Io passes that Juno will make (though the record still goes to the Galileo mission, which passed 112 miles (181 kilometers) from Io in 2001). We now have some new stunning views of the tormented surface, many of which can be viewed on the JunoCam Gallery.
The latest close pass came just before perijove 58, meaning it's the 58th time the probe has circled the giant planet. It has been just over a month since Juno's last close pass of the moon, on December 30, 2023. NASA has revamped Juno's extended mission plan to schedule seven more flybys of Io, for 18 in all, although the remaining passes will be progressively farther away.
The recent set of flybys probed the moon's interior as well as its surface. "With our pair of close flybys in December and February, Juno will investigate the source of Io's massive volcanic activity, whether a magma ocean exists underneath its crust, and the importance of tidal forces from Jupiter, which are relentlessly squeezing this tortured moon," says Scott Bolton (Southwest Research Institute) in a recent press release.
As other missions have done before it, Juno spied active volcanoes spewing out material along the moon's limb:
And to think, early mission proposals originally didn't even call for the mission to have a camera! Besides proving handy for publish outreach, the probe's JunoCam has also provided great closeup views of the major Jovian moons during the extended phase of the mission. Lots of these images are worked though by online volunteers, with amazing results.
Other recent close passes also revealed volcanic activity, including this JunoCam image from late last year:
Io, which is a little larger than Earth's Moon, is the most geologically active world in the solar system. Its core gets a real workout from Jupiter's enormous gravitational field, whose tidal forces heat the moon's interior. The volcanoes in turn spew energetic charged particles into the powerful Io plasma torus, which connects via magnetic field lines back to Jupiter, creating a complex, interactive system.
JunoCam was actually impacted radiation exposure during the December 30th perijove pass. Engineers used a method known as 'annealing' to use internal heaters on the camera to warm it up and repair the imager for this month's pass.
The Juno mission has thus far spent over seven years at Jupiter, working as the first solar-powered mission in the outer solar system. For most of its mission, Juno has stayed well out of range of the major moons, for safety reasons. The primary mission was to measure Jupiterās magnetic field and interior, something Juno could do safely from a distance.
Now, though, a series of close passes have shortened Juno's orbit, bringing it down to 33 days. That puts the probe ever closer to Jupiter and its potentially lethal radiation, but also in scientifically interesting regions.
As of this writing, Juno is funded through September 2025. Ultimately, Juno won't share the same fate as the Galileo mission, which burned up in the Jovian atmosphereā¦ such a final deposal orbit is unnecessary, as Juno is now safely within the interior of Europa and cannot contaminate the icy moon. Instead, Juno will spend its days derelict, until it either burns up in the atmosphere of Jupiter or impacts a small interior moon.
Juno is currently the only mission active at Jupiter, but ESAās Jupiter Icy Moons (JUICE) mission launched just last year and will arrive at Jupiter in 2031. NASAās Europa Clipper, set to launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket on October 10th, will beat JUICE to Jupiter, arriving in 2030.
In the meantime, weāll ride with Juno for one more year of awe-inspiring exploration.
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/nasas-juno-mission-makes-closest-flyby-past-io/
Space Rock That Exploded Over Germany Turns Out To Be Very Rare Meteorite
Feb 5, 2024
In the early hours of January 21, asteroid 2024 BX1 flew through the atmosphere over Germany, burning up and breaking apart about 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Berlin. It was only the eighth asteroid ever predicted to collide with Earth before it hit the planet, giving us a rare 95-minute warning. This led to a scientific hunt for possible meteorites and quickly one was found ā which has turned out to be a very rare find.
Researchers from the Museum fĆ¼r Naturkunde Berlin as well as colleagues from the Freie UniversitƤt Berlin and the German Aerospace Center initially recovered the walnut-sized meteorite from a field in the town of Ribbeck, about 80 kilometers north-west of Berlin. Analysis of the rock suggests that it is in the rare group of achondrites known as aubrites. There are only 87 known samples of this type of space rock from just 17 sites globally.
"Based on a comparison against the AubrƩs fall, we were able to make a rough classification of the Ribbeck meteorites relatively quickly," Dr Ansgar Greshake, scientific head of the museum's Meteorite Collection, said in a statement. "This underlines the immense importance of scientific collections for research. So far, there is only material from eleven observed aubrite falls in collections worldwide."
Aubrites look very different from other meteorites. They are typically light-colored and if they have a fusion crust then they are brownish, a difference that stems from their peculiar composition. The team has now found 20 meteorite samples, the analysis of which is ongoing. Electron microprobes of the first revealed the kinship to aubrites.
"Aubrites look more like a grayish granite and consist mainly of the magnesium silicates enstatite and forsterite," explained Dr Christopher Hamann, who was involved in the meteoriteās initial classification and is with the museumās Solar System, Impacts and Meteorites department.
"It contains hardly any iron and the fusion crust, a thin, tell-tale layer of quenched melt coating meteorites and which typically allows identifying them as such in the field, looks completely different than that of most other meteorites. Aubrites are therefore difficult to detect in the field."
The peculiar mineralogical structures seen in aubrites suggest that their parent body must have had a violent history. Not that their parent body is known. One hypothesis is that the parent belongs to the E-type asteroids in the Solar System's inner Asteroid Belt that are thought to have achondrite surfaces. Or maybe they were broken off from a near-Earth object, 3103 Eger, which is also an E-type but gets very close to Earth. Another suggestion is that they are pieces of another planet: Mercury.
The samples were submitted to the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society on February 2 for examination and confirmation. Hopefully, we might find out more about these rare types of meteorites.
https://www.iflscience.com/space-rock-that-exploded-over-germany-turns-out-to-be-very-rare-meteorite-72798
Rael The Alien Prophet: Netflix release date, what is Raƫlism, who is Claude Vorilhon, UFO religion explained
6th Feb 2024, 11:59 GMT
Raƫl: The Alien Prophet, one of Netflix's most bizarre docu-series ever, is set to land on Netflix this week and will surely have many asking the following question - who, and what, is Raƫlism?
A UFO-inspired religion, the new Netflix TV series will feature interviews with the religions followers, critics and the founder Raƫlism himself as it traces how the alien inspired religion turned into spiralled into a controversial cult that saw a number of court cases and shocking TV appearances.
Wanting to watch the show but want to know more about Raƫlism, Raƫl and the what he believes about the world? Here is everything you need to know about the highly anticipated new Netflix series Raƫl: The Alien Prophet.
Who is Raƫl, who is Claude Vorilhon and where is he now?
Born in Vichy, France 1946 as Claude Maurice Marcel Vorilhon, he is the leader and founder of the Raƫlian Movement, an international UFO religion, and a French journalist.
Prior to his religious beliefs, he worked as a sports-journalist for car-racing magazine, Autopop. However, he life changed after a alleged encounter with an alien called Yahweh in December 1973. Following this he formed the Raƫlian Movement and changed his name to Raƫl. He has written many books since his purported alien encounter with Yahweh and has travelled the world to promote them.
He has been accused by ex-Raƫlians have of plagiarism in his works, with some passages compared to the works of author Jean Sendy, with many Raƫlian concepts present in Sendy's books. It is also claimed much of his Raƫlian philosophy matches that of Osho, founder of the Rajneesh movement.
During a TV appearance in the 1990s, his practices were critiqued by a priest, a social worker, and a psychologist while one former follower of the religion, Jean Parraga, claimed his wife and children were being held as prisoners and were 'treated like criminals' during orgies and sacrifices that involve children at a Sensual Meditation camp that he ran.
Journalist Stephane Baillargeon was sued by Raƫl after writing in the Montreal daily Le Devoir that the religion has defended paedophiles and that Raƫl liked very young girls. Latterly the Le Devoir published a letter from Raƫl which denied the claims as "ignominious defamation" and further claimed the Raƫlian Movement had "always condemned paedophilia and promoted respect for laws that justly forbid the practices that are always the fault of unbalanced individuals".
More recently, in 2007, he was denied a move to the Swiss Canton Valais. This partly because he was feared to be endangering public values due his promotion of sexual liberty and the education of children on how to obtain sexual pleasure. He was also denied entry in part due to his belief in 'Clonaid human cloning' which is forbidden in the country.
What is Raƫlism?
Also known as Raƫlianism, the religion was found in France during the the 1970s by Claude Vorilhon - who is now known as Raƫl. It is a new religious movement and is led by Vorilhon/Raƫl. Raƫlians meditate daily and believe physical immortality to be possible through human cloning. They promote a liberal ethical system and have a strong emphasis on sexual experimentation. The also believe in 'sexual self-determination' which is thought to be an act that precedes a sexual action and now the sexual action itself.
The religion is an atheist one and its teachings say that an extraterrestrial species called 'Elohim' is actually what created humanity and that they did so by using advanced technology that the extraterrestrials had. They believe that the Elohim have created a total of 40 Elohim/human hybrids and that they serve as prophets and who preparing humanity for news about their origins. They believe four of those prophets to be hem are The Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad while Raƫl himself claims he is the 40th and final prophet.
What do followers of Raƫlism believe?
They believe that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 saw humanity enter the 'Age of Apocalypse'. Raƫlism claims humanity must harness new new scientific and technological development in order to bring forth peace and that when that is achieved, the extraterrestrial species of Elohim will come back to planet Earth and provide their own advanced technology to humans which will then bring forth utopia.
They have looked to build an embassy that will allow the Elohim to have a landing pad where they can land when they re-enter Earth.
The documentary will land on Netflix UK on Wednesday 7 February 2024 and is split into four episodes.
https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/film-and-tv/rael-the-alien-prophet-netflix-release-date-what-is-raelism-who-is-claude-vorilhon-ufo-religion-explained-4506687
https://www.rael.org/