Sep 04, 2012 Could an ocean of liquid water exist on Europa? According to a recent press release, “Sending a submarine to the bottom of the ocean on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is the most exciting potential mission in planetary science…” Is it a forlorn hope? Europa is the fourth…
August 30, 2012 A new mission to map the gravity field of the Moon. On September 10, 2011 NASA launched the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) satellites on a mission to the Moon. GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B are nearly identical spacecraft, except that B is designed to follow A around…
August 28, 2012 Mercury reveals the violence of planetary genesis. Mercury’s story is probably a complicated tale of extremes. The planet’s surface is heavily scarred, with steep-walled canyons, scarps that rise up several kilometers, and craters that penetrate the crust for several kilometers below the mean elevation. The difference in…
August 23, 2012 Heliophysicists acknowledge the role of plasma in solar eruptions but miss important aspects of its behavior. In Bengal to move at all Is seldom, if ever, done, But mad dogs and Englishmen Go out in the midday sun. — Noël Coward According to a recent press release, the…
August 22, 2012 Astronomers continue to ignore electricity in space, opting for outdated ideas about gravity and heat. Recently, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that our own Milky Way galaxy is expelling enormous jets of gamma rays from a putative supermassive black hole residing in its nucleus….
August 21, 2012 The Dawn spacecraft will arrive at Ceres in August of 2015 Ceres is the largest asteroid in the Solar System. The most recent measurement from the Hubble Space Telescope puts it at approximately 975 kilometers in mean diameter. It is so large that it is roughly spherical,…
Aug 16, 2012 Recent X-class solar flares have ignited the polar lights. An electrically active magnetotail (or plasma tail) extends for millions of kilometers from Earth. Charged particles from the Sun, otherwise known as the solar wind, together with ions generated by the Earth, gather in a plasma sheet inside the…
August 13, 2012 Is it gravity and heat that cause landslides on Iapetus? Recently, the science journal Nature Geoscience described giant, icy landslides that are supposedly taking place on the Saturnian moon Iapetus. According to the report, it is frictional heating that overcomes resistance, causing the moon’s crust to…
August 10, 2012 What causes the rapid changes observed in Orion Nebula “protostars”? Using a combination of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the ESA Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers found that so-called “young stars” are changing in brightness much faster than they thought possible. Instead of taking several years for material…
August 09, 2012 A star becomes a diamond? A recent press release announced the “discovery” of a planet in orbit around a pulsar that is thought to have once been a star, but is now a planetary body composed of something similar to compressed carbon, or diamond. The reason for…
