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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Insulating Crust kept Cryomagma Liquid for millions of years on nearby Dwarf Planet

    February 13, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The bright spots of Occator Crater shine from the surface of Ceres. Research led by The University of Texas at Austin is helping reveal how the spots formed from cryomagma. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

    A recent NASA mission to the dwarf planet Ceres found brilliant, white spots of salts on its surface. New research led by The University of Texas at Austin in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) delved into the factors that influenced the volcanic activity that formed the distinctive spots and that could play a key role in mixing the ingredients for life on other worlds.

    The volcanoes on Ceres are cryovolcanoes, a type of volcano that forms on planetary bodies with icy shells and that moves salty water known as cryomagma from underground reservoirs to...

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    Possibility of Recent Underground Volcanism on Mars

    February 13, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This is the Martian South Pole. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters argues there needs to be an underground source of heat for liquid water to exist underneath the polar ice cap.
    Credit: NASA

    New research suggests liquid water is present beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars. Now, a new study argues there needs to be an underground source of heat for liquid water to exist underneath the polar ice cap. The new research does not take sides as to whether the liquid water exists. Instead, the authors suggest recent magmatic activity – the formation of a magma chamber within the past few hundred thousand years – must have occurred underneath the surface of Mars for there to be enough heat to produce liquid water underneath the kilometer-and-a-half thick ice cap...

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    MAVEN Spacecraft Shrinking its Mars Orbit to prepare for Mars 2020 rover

    February 11, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    NASA's MAVEN spacecraft shrinking its Mars orbit to prepare for Mars 2020 rover
    Aerobraking plan for MAVEN. (left) Current MAVEN orbit around Mars: 6,200 kilometers (~3,850 miles) at highest altitude, and an orbit period of about 4.5 hours. (center) Aerobraking process: MAVEN performs a series of “deep dip” orbits approaching to within about 125 kilometers (~78 miles) of Mars at lowest altitude, causing drag from the atmosphere to slow down the spacecraft. Over roughly 360 orbits spanning 2.5 months, this technique reduces the spacecraft’s altitude to about 4,500 kilometers (~2,800 miles) and its orbit period to about 3.5 hours. (right) Post-aerobraking orbit, with reduced altitude and shorter orbit period. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Kel Elkins and Dan Gallagher

    Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-maven-spacecraft-mars-orbit-rover.html#jCp
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    Liberal Sprinkling of Salt discovered around a Young Star

    February 10, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Chemistry/Nanotechnology

    Artist impression of Orion Source I, a young, massive star about 1,500 light-years away. New ALMA observations detected a ring of salt — sodium chloride, ordinary table salt — surrounding the star. This is the first detection of salts of any kind associated with a young star. The blue region (about 1/3 the way out from the center of the disk) represents the region where ALMA detected the millimeter-wavelength “glow” from the salts.
    Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; S. Dagnello

    A team of astronomers and chemists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has detected the chemical fingerprints of sodium chloride (NaCl) and other similar salty compounds emanating from the dusty disk surrounding Orion Source I, a massive, young star in a dusty cloud behind the Orion Nebula.

    “It’...

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