Category Astronomy/Space

Mars Curiosity Rover takes a Last Look at Mysterious Sulfur

NASA’s Curiosity rover is preparing for the next leg of its journey, a months-long trek to a formation called the boxwork, a set of weblike patterns on Mars’s surface that stretches for miles. It will soon leave behind Gediz Vallis channel, an area wrapped in mystery. How the channel formed so late during a transition to a drier climate is one big question for the science team. Another mystery is the field of white sulfur stones the rover discovered over the summer.

Curiosity imaged the stones, along with features from inside the channel, in a 360-degree panorama before driving up to the western edge of the channel at the end of September.

The rover is searching for evidence that ancient Mars had the right ingredients to support microbial life, if any formed billions of years ag...

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Engineers Transform Smartphones into Instruments for Studying Space

Engineers transform smartphones into instruments for studying space
Credit: University of Colorado at Boulder

That ordinary smartphone in your pocket could be a powerful tool for investigating outer space. In a new study, researchers at Google and CU Boulder have transformed millions of Android phones across the globe into a fleet of nimble scientific instruments—generating one of the most detailed maps to date of the uppermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere.

The group’s findings, published Nov. 13 in the journal Nature, might help to improve the accuracy of GPS technology worldwide several-fold. The research was led by Brian Williams of Google Research and included Jade Morton, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU Boulder.

“These phones can literally fit in your palm,” Morton said...

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NASA Satellites reveal Abrupt Drop in Global Freshwater Levels

An angular statellite orbits high over the earth in an artists ipression of the GRACE mission. A radar and laser beams link the satellite to a companion satallite far in the distance.
GRACE satellites measure gravity as they orbit the planet to reveal shifting levels of water on the Earth (artist’s concept).
NASA/JPL-Caltech

An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth’s total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth’s continents have entered a persistently drier phase.

From 2015 through 2023, satellite measurements showed that the average amount of freshwater stored on land—that includes liquid surface water like lakes and rivers, plus water in aquifers underground—was 290 cubic miles (1,200 cubic km) lower than the average levels from 2002 through 2014, said...

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Hubble Sees Aftermath of Galaxy’s Scrape with Milky Way

A whitish, whirlpool-like galaxy at middle of top edge, and a tadpole-shaped structure sweeps from left to right across lower half. A label pointing to outer, left of galaxy reads “Earth.” Faint, purple haze labeled “Milky Way Halo” surrounds galaxy and stretches to graphic’s edges.  The tadpole-shaped object is the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, with its own halo and streaming tail. Semi-circular, progressively darker layers of purple labeled “LMC Halo” surround the LMC, which appears roughly circular, with a central, light-yellow bar. Cloud-like features sprinkled with white specks surround this bar. Trailing the LMC is a large, tail-like  feature labeled “Stream.” At the bottom left corner of graphic are several small, bright points of light labeled “Quasars.” Three light blue lines point from the label “Earth” through the LMC’s halo, and to three corresponding quasars. At the bottom, right corner is the label “Artist’s Concept.”
This artist’s concept shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, in the foreground as it passes through the gaseous halo of the much more massive Milky Way galaxy. The encounter has blown away most of the spherical halo of gas that surrounds the LMC, as illustrated by the trailing gas stream reminiscent of a comet’s tail. Still, a compact halo remains, and scientists do not expect this residual halo to be lost. The team surveyed the halo by using the background light of 28 quasars, an exceptionally bright type of active galactic nucleus that shines across the universe like a lighthouse beacon. Their light allows scientists to “see” the intervening halo gas indirectly through the absorption of the background light...
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