‘Blowing my mind’: Peaks on Pluto, canyons on Charon

Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI via AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Mankind’s first close-up look at Pluto did not disappoint Wednesday: The pictures showed ice mountains on Pluto about as high as the Rockies and chasms on its big moon Charon that appear six times deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Especially astonishing to scientists was the total absence of impact craters in a zoom-in shot of one otherwise rugged slice of Pluto. That suggests that Pluto is not the dead ice ball many people think, but is instead geologically active even now, its surface sculpted not by collisions with cosmic debris but by its internal heat, the scientific team reported.

Breathtaking in their clarity, the long-awaited images were unveiled in Laurel, Maryland, home to mission operations for NASA’s New Horizons, the unmanned spacecraft that paid a history-making flyby visit to the dwarf planet on Tuesday after a journey of 9½ years and 3 billion miles.

“I don’t think any one of us could have imagined that it was this good of a toy store,” principal scientist Alan Stern said at a news conference. He marveled: “I think the whole system is amazing. … The Pluto system IS something wonderful.”

As a tribute to Pluto’s discoverer, Stern and his team named the bright heart-shaped area on the surface of Pluto the Tombaugh Reggio. American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh spied the frozen, faraway world on the edge of the solar system in 1930.

Thanks to New Horizons, scientists now know Pluto is a bit bigger than thought, with a diameter of 1,473 miles, but still just two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon. And it is most certainly not frozen in time.

The zoom-in of Pluto, showing an approximately 150-mile swath of the dwarf planet, reveals a mountain range about 11,000 feet high and tens of miles wide. Scientists said the peaks — seemingly pushed up from Pluto’s subterranean bed of ice — appeared to be a mere 100 million years old. Pluto itself is 4.5 billion years old.

“Who would have supposed that there were ice mountains?” project scientist Hal Weaver said. “It’s just blowing my mind.”

John Spencer, like Stern a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, called it “just astonishing” that the first close-up picture of Pluto didn’t have a single impact crater. Stern said the findings suggesting a geologically active interior are going to “send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing boards.”

“It could be a game-changer” in how scientists look at other frozen worlds in the Kuiper Belt on the fringes of our solar system, Spencer said. Charon, too, has a surprisingly youthful look and could be undergoing geologic activity.

“We’ve tended to think of these midsize worlds … as probably candy-coated lumps of ice,” Spencer said. “This means they could be equally diverse and be equally amazing if we ever get a spacecraft out there to see them close up.”

The heat that appears to be shaping Pluto may be coming from the decay of radioactive material normally found in planetary bodies, the scientists said. Or it could be coming from energy released by the gradual freezing of an underground ocean.

As for Charon, which is about half the size of Pluto, its canyons look to be 3 miles to 6 miles deep and are part of a cluster of troughs and cliffs stretching 600 miles, or about twice the length of the Grand Canyon, scientists said.

The Charon photo was taken Monday. The Pluto picture was shot just 1½ hours before the spacecraft’s moment of closest approach. New Horizons swept to within 7,700 miles of Pluto during its flyby. It is now 1 million miles beyond it.

Up until this week, the best pictures of Pluto were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and they were blurry, pixelated images.

Read Full Article: AP

Lifting the Veil on Pluto’s Atmosphere

Artist David A. Hardy’s view of Pluto and Charon showing the possibility of haze, clouds and even cryovulcanism.
Credit: © David A. Hardy, www.astroart.org

You might guess that a small and distant world almost 40 times farther from the sun than the Earth is from the sun would not have an atmosphere, but in the case of Pluto, you’d be wrong. In fact, Pluto is a complex world, particularly when it comes to weather patterns. Gusty winds, clouds, haze, micro snowflakes and even ice volcanoes — cryovolcanism — could all be part of Pluto’s dynamic weather system. While such observations have come from Earth-based telescopes, many more surprises might be revealed as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft makes its nearest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015.

But no matter how you classify it, this icy and remote dwarf planet is an odd little world.

Evidence of Pluto’s atmosphere

Though Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, it wasn’t until 1988 that scientists first detected an atmosphere on the dwarf planet during a stellar occultation. In a stellar occultation, a body such as a planet passes in front of a relatively bright star, and measuring the gradual dimming of starlight during such an event, scientists can amass a wide array of information about a planet, including its size, whether it has rings or if an atmosphere is present. Having theoretically worked out that Pluto should have an atmosphere, scientists set out to find it.

“When the 1988 stellar occultation occurred, scientists were out to detect the atmosphere, which had been expected on theoretical grounds for more than a decade,” Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, said via email.

The June 9, 1988, stellar occultation by Pluto provided the first opportunity for astronomers using telescopes located in Australia, New Zealand, and the Kuiper Airborne Observatory flying over the ocean south of the Samoa islands to detect an atmosphere on the dwarf planet.

If an atmosphere on Pluto were not present, starlight would blink instantly off and then back on again at the end of the occultation. However, for a short time at the start and end of the occultation, Pluto’s atmosphere was backlit by the star, and the starlight dimmed more gradually. By modeling how the atmosphere refracted, or bent, the starlight, researchers detected that Pluto has a thin layer of atmosphere made of gaseous forms of the ices — nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and traces of others — that cover its surface.

“The occultation light curve shows a structured decline in intensity rather than a precipitous decline indicative of an atmosphere surrounding Pluto,” said Paul Delaney, a senior lecturer of physics and astronomy at York University in Toronto.

When astronomers graph the light data, a careful look at the gradual dimming of starlight shown in the occultation light curve reveals a “slight bend,” or “kink.” You can also see from the light curve that starlight does not penetrate all the way to Pluto’s surface. Starlight did not reach the surface, suggesting that obscuring clouds and/or haze might mask the surface.

“The symmetry and structure of the occultation light curve is suggestive of an atmosphere with structure, in comparison to the absence of an atmosphere surrounding Pluto,” Delaney noted. Hence, the presence of the same kink on either side of the curve suggests there is an atmosphere engulfing Pluto, he said.

The most recent Pluto occultation opportunity was on June 29, 2015, in the southern hemisphere, just two weeks before New Horizons makes its closest approach to the Pluto system. The only observatory able to position itself directly in the center of Pluto’s shadow, located off of New Zealand, was NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747SP jetliner modified to carry a 100-inch-diameter (2.5 meters) telescope.

“SOFIA observations of Pluto demonstrate a capability to make detailed measurements of Pluto’s atmospheric density and structure,” said Pamela Marcum, SOFIA program scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “SOFIA conducted its first occultation observation, also involving Pluto, in July 2011. This flight adds to our understanding of how the atmosphere of Pluto evolves over multiple-year time scales as its elongated orbit takes it farther away from the sun.”

The comparative sizes of the atmospheres of Pluto and Earth.
Credit: Simulation Curriculum, www.PlutoSafari.com

Seasonal changes on Pluto

Once the existence of Pluto’s atmosphere was confirmed, scientists began to investigate how the atmosphere and the surface temperature change during Pluto’s 248-Earth-year journey around the sun. The orbit of Pluto follows a highly elliptical orbit that resembles a squashed circle. In fact, its orbit is so elliptical that during perihelion (its closest point to the sun), Pluto is only about 30 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, bringing it closer to the sun than to its closest neighbor, Neptune.

During aphelion (its farthest point from the sun), Pluto is about 50 AU from the sun. (One AU is about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles), defined as one Earth-sun distance.)

The large 20-AU difference between Pluto’s perihelion and aphelion distance results in interesting chemistry on Pluto’s surface and in its atmosphere. Pluto is a rocky body covered in ice. At perihelion, Pluto’s surface temperature increases to about minus 220 degrees Celsius (minus 364 degrees Fahrenheit), allowing the ice on its surface to sublimate — that is, transition directly from a solid to a gas. The resulting vapors form a layer of atmosphere made of molecular nitrogen (with trace amounts of carbon monoxide and methane).

Scientists originally thought that as Pluto recedes from the sun, and the temperature decreases to about minus 240 C (minus 400 F), the vapors freeze and fall back down to the dwarf planet’s surface. However, observations made as recently as 2013 and coordinated by the Portable High-Speed OccultationTelescope group from multiple sites including the 0.9 m astrograph at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and the 1 m Liverpool Telescope on the Canary Islands, indicate that Pluto’s atmosphere is not collapsing, but rather thickening.

So, although Pluto’s atmosphere gets thicker and thinner through its orbit of the sun, it may never completely freeze out and “collapse.”

Michael Summers, New Horizons co-investigator and member of the atmospheres science theme team, said it’s too early to tell whether Pluto’s atmosphere freezes out or persists through its orbit. This makes sense, as Pluto has made only one-tenth of an orbit around the sun since the discovery of its atmosphere in 1988.

Summers used a tangible analogy to explain what may be happening — one that we see daily on Earth. “There is a time delay between the highest temperature and the maximum heating. … The maximum heating from the sun during the day is when the sun is directly overhead, at noon,” he explained. “But the highest temperature usually occurs later, around 2 p.m. in the afternoon. The Earth continues to heat up from noon to 2 p.m. That is due to a thermal lag; it takes less time to heat up the atmosphere than it takes for it to cool off.

“I think, for Pluto, it just takes time for it to cool off,” Summers added. “In fact, it may still be heating up, sort of like we are still in the Earth’s, say 1 p.m., time frame for Pluto.”

Another interesting fact about Pluto’s atmosphere is that it evolves quickly. Work by a team led by Jane Greaves, an astrophysics researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, shows that the carbon monoxide density in Pluto’s atmosphere has increased in just a decade. Additionally, Greaves’ team found carbon monoxide extending out to more than 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) from Pluto’s surface. The molecules that reach such extents will likely escape, as solar winds will just carry them out into space.

When New Horizons arrives at the Pluto system, onboard science instruments such as Alice, a sensitive ultraviolet imaging spectrometer, will reveal even more about the composition and structure of the dwarf planet’s dynamic atmosphere. Continued observations of stellar occultations of Pluto will show us whether its atmosphere freezes out. Pluto last reached perihelion in 1989, and it will not reach perihelion again until 2237. Therefore, if its atmosphere does freeze out, scientists won’t observe this until somewhere around the year 2200.

Read Full Article: Space

Pluto close-up: Spacecraft makes flyby of icy, mystery world

Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI via AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — We’ve made it to Pluto by NASA’s calculations, the last stop on a planetary tour of the solar system a half-century in the making.

The moment of closest approach for the New Horizons spacecraft came at 7:49 a.m. EDT Tuesday, culminating a journey from planet Earth that spanned an incredible 3 billion miles and 9½ years.

Based on everything NASA knows, New Horizons was straight on course for the historic encounter, sweeping within 7,800 miles of Pluto at 31,000 mph. But official confirmation won’t come until Tuesday night, 13 nerve-racking hours later. That’s because NASA wants New Horizons taking pictures of Pluto, its jumbo moon Charon and its four little moons during this critical time, not gabbing to Earth.

NASA marked the moment live on TV, broadcasting from flight operations in Maryland.

“This is truly a hallmark in human history,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s science mission chief.

“It’s a moment of celebration,” added principal scientist Alan Stern from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, the spacecraft’s developer and manager. “We’ve just done the anchor leg, we have completed the initial reconnaissance of the solar system, an endeavor started under President Kennedy more than 50 years ago.”

The United States is now the only nation to visit every single planet in the solar system. Pluto was No. 9 in the lineup when New Horizons departed Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 19, 2006, but was demoted seven months later to dwarf status. Scientists in charge of the $720 million mission, as well as NASA brass, hope the new observations will restore Pluto’s honor.

“It’s a huge morning, a huge day not just for NASA but for the United States,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said from NASA headquarters in Washington.

Inside “countdown central” at Johns Hopkins in Laurel, Maryland, hundreds jammed together to share in the remaining final minutes, including the two children of the American astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh. The actual flight control room was empty save for a worker sweeping up; the spacecraft was preprogrammed for the flyby and there was nothing anyone could do at this point but join in the celebration.

Stern led the festivity, joined on stage by his team and Tombaugh’s two children.

The crowd waved U.S. flags and counted down from nine seconds, screaming, cheering and applauding. Chants of “USA!” broke out.

It takes 4½ hours for signals to travel one-way between New Horizons and flight controllers, the speed of light. The last time controllers heard from the spacecraft was Monday night, according to plan, and everything looked good.

New Horizons already has beamed back the best-ever images of Pluto and big moon Charon. Pluto also has four little moons, all of which were expected to come under New Horizons’ scrutiny. The pictures are “mind-boggling to put it mildly,” Bolden said.

As Stern told reporters Monday, “The Pluto system is enchanting in its strangeness, its alien beauty.”

The newest pictures, from the actual flyby, won’t be transmitted until well afterward so the seven science instruments can take full advantage of the encounter. In fact, it will take more than a year to get back all the data.

On the eve of the flyby, NASA announced that Pluto is actually bigger than anyone imagined, thanks to measurements made by the spacecraft, a baby grand piano-size affair. It’s about 50 miles bigger than estimated, for a grand total of 1,473 miles in diameter.

Pluto is now confirmed to be the largest object in the so-called Kuiper Belt, considered the third zone of the solar system after the inner rocky planets and outer gaseous ones. This unknown territory is a shooting gallery of comets and other small bodies.

Read Full Article: AP

Martian marathon: Watch Opportunity rove across alien terrain

Image Credit: Nasa

You can now see what it would be like to run a marathon on Mars, thanks to a new time-lapse video captured by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

The images shown in the video were taken by cameras on the rover between January 2004 and April 2015, as Opportunity traveled 26.2 miles from its original landing location inside a crater on a flat plain known as Meridiani Planum.

Opportunity is the longest-running Mars rover. Its mission was originally intended to last 90 Sols (a Sol, one Martian day, is 24 hours and 37 minutes), but it’s still roaming the Red Planet 11 years later.

The 384-pound rover has multiple cameras: a panoramic camera, a navigational camera, and a microscopic imager, which can take high-resolution close-up images of rocks and soils.

Opportunity also has several instruments for analyzing composition and mineralogy, including a miniature thermal emission spectrometer, an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, and a rock abrasion tool that exposes fresh material underneath the dust and weathered rinds that coat most Martian rocks.

Over the course of its documented journey, Opportunity has explored two large craters, Victoria and Endeavour, and found multiple signs of water. It also managed to survive several potentially hazardous situations, including an encounter with a sand trap and a bad dust storm.

In July 2014, Opportunity broke an off-world driving record when it hit 25.01 miles, surpassing the previous record set by the Soviet Union’s remote-controlled lunar Lunokhod 2 rover on the moon in 1973.

Read Full Article: The Christian Science Monitor

It’s showtime for Pluto; prepare to be amazed by NASA flyby

Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI via AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Pluto, reveal thyself, and Earthlings, enjoy the show.

On Tuesday, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will sweep past Pluto and present the previously unexplored world in all its icy glory.

It promises to be the biggest planetary unveiling in a quarter-century. The curtain hasn’t been pulled back like this since NASA’s Voyager 2 shed light on Neptune in 1989.

Now it’s little Pluto’s turn to shine way out on the frigid fringes of our solar system.

New Horizons has traveled 3 billion miles over 9½ years to get to this historic point. The fastest spacecraft ever launched, it carries the most powerful suite of science instruments ever sent on a scouting and reconnaissance mission of a new, unfamiliar world.

Guarantees principal scientist Alan Stern, “We’re going to knock your socks off.”

The size of a baby grand piano, the spacecraft will come closest to Pluto on Tuesday morning — at 7:49 a.m. EDT. That’s when New Horizons is predicted to pass within 7,767 miles of Pluto. Fourteen minutes later, the spacecraft will zoom within 17,931 miles of Charon, Pluto’s jumbo moon.

For the plutophiles among us, it will be cause to celebrate, especially for those gathered at the operations center at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The lab designed and built the spacecraft for NASA, and has been managing its roundabout route through the solar system.

“What NASA’s doing with New Horizons is unprecedented in our time and probably something close to the last train to Clarksville, the last picture show, for a very, very long time,” says Stern, a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

It is the last stop in NASA’s quest to explore every planet in our solar system, starting with Venus in 1962. And in a cosmic coincidence, the Pluto visit falls on the 50th anniversary of the first-ever flyby of Mars, by Mariner 4.

Yes, we all know Pluto is no longer an official planet, merely a dwarf, but it still enjoyed full planet status when New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 19, 2006. Pluto’s demotion came just seven months later, a sore subject still for many.

“We’re kind of running the anchor leg with Pluto to finish the relay,” Stern says.

The sneak peeks of Pluto in recent weeks are getting “juicier and juicier,” says Johns Hopkins project scientist Hal Weaver. “The science team is just drooling over these pictures.”

The Hubble Space Telescope previously captured the best pictures of Pluto. If the pixelated blobs of pictures had been of Earth, though, not even the continents would have been visible.

The New Horizons team is turning “a point of light into a planet,” Stern says.

An image released last week shows a copper-colored Pluto bearing, a large, bright spot in the shape of a heart.

Scientists expect image resolution to improve dramatically by Tuesday. The 7,767-mile span at closest approach is about the distance between Seattle and Sydney.

New Horizons, weighing less than 1,000 pounds including fuel, has seven instruments that will be going full force during the encounter. It’s expected to collect 5,000 times as much data, for instance, as Mariner 4.

“We’re going to rewrite the book,” Weaver says. “This is it — this is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it.”

The team gets one crack at this.

“We’re trying to hit a very small box, relatively speaking,” says Mark Holdridge, the encounter mission manager. “It’s 60 by 90 miles, and we’re going 30,000 mph, and we’re trying to hit that box within a plus or minus 100 seconds.”

The only planet in our solar system discovered by an American, Pluto actually is a mini solar system unto itself. Pluto — just two-thirds the size of our own moon — has big moon Charon that’s just over half its size, as well as baby moons Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos. The names are associated with the underworld in which the mythological god, Pluto, reigned. New Horizons will observe each known moon and keep a lookout for more.

Scientists involved in the $700 million effort want to get a good look at Pluto and Charon, and get a handle on their surfaces and chemical composition. They also plan to measure the temperature and pressure in Pluto’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere and determine how much gas is escaping into space. Temperatures can plunge to nearly minus-400 degrees.

Bill McKinnon, a New Horizons team member from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, expects to see craters and possible volcanic remnants. A liquid ocean and a rocky core may lie beneath the icy shell.

“Anybody who thinks that when we go to Pluto, we’re going to find cold, dead ice balls is in for a rude shock,” McKinnon says. “I’m really hoping to see a very active and dynamic world.”

Pluto has tantalized astronomers since its 1930 discovery by Clyde Tombaugh using the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Some of Tombaugh’s ashes are aboard New Horizons. His two children, now in their 70s, plan to be at Johns Hopkins for the encounter.

With its tilted, elongated 248-year orbit, Pluto has made it only a third of the way around the sun since its discovery. The amount of sunlight that reaches Pluto is so dim that at high noon it looks like twilight here on Earth. The massive surrounding Kuiper Belt, in fact, is called the Twilight Zone. The New Horizons team has its eyes on a few much smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt, and is hoping for a mission extension as the spacecraft continues toward the solar system exit on the heels of NASA’s Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11.

For now, signals take 4½ hours to travel one-way between New Horizons and flight controllers in Maryland.

New Horizons’ science instruments will be cranked up to collect maximum data Tuesday, leaving no time to send back data. In fact, scientists won’t be absolutely certain of success until Tuesday night, 13 hours following New Horizons’ closest approach, when it “phones home.”

It will be Wednesday before the closest of Pluto’s close-ups are available for release. And it will be well into next year — October 2016 — before all the anticipated data are transmitted to Earth.

“We’re all going to have to be patient,” urges deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin.

Read Full Article: AP

The lost 81 minutes. Is New Horizons spacecraft ready for Pluto flyby?

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Just 10 days before it was scheduled to give humanity its first-ever closeup view of Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft went unexpectedly silent.

For 81 minutes on July 4, NASA lost control with its probe. When New Horizons started communicating again, it told mission control that it was in safe mode – in other words, it wasn’t doing anything except keeping itself alive while waiting for new instructions from Earth, three billion miles away.

Scientists are trying to figure out what happened, and they must now essentially reboot the craft so it will be fully operational when it hurtles to within 7,800 miles of Pluto on the morning of July 14. It is a daunting task. Each command takes 8.8 hours to carry out – 4.4 hours to transmit to depths of the solar system and another 4.4 hours for New Horizons to transmit its answer back. The process could take days.

But the engineers furiously working to put things right have at least one small comfort: They were made for this.

Between the disappointments of lost spacecraft and the pride of textbook missions is the more-common reality of robotic spaceflight: Something often goes wrong, and NASA needs to pop the hood on a balky piece of machinery from millions of miles away. From Galileo similarly shutting down just hours before it was to make a flyby of Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io, to the Spirit rover temporarily becoming little more than an expensive Martian paperweight, space stuff breaks and – with remarkable ingenuity – NASA fixes it.

NASA engineers are currently trying to figure out what went wrong with New Horizons. But with communication reestablished, they are hopeful that the craft will be in fine working order well before July 14. Some preliminary imaging of Pluto and its moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra will be lost. But the team is not too worried about that.

“We may lose a few appetizers off the planned menu,” mission participant Richard Binzel told Sky & Telescope, “but right now the focus is on delivering the main course.”

On Thanksgiving Day 1999, “main course” took on an even more poignant meaning. Galileo went into safe mode just as engineers were cutting their turkeys and dipping into their mashed potato. In order to save the Io flyby, they had to manually retype and resend every command sequence – without a single error – so Galileo knew what to do. The original designers had expected the process of rebooting the spacecraft to take a month; the Thanksgiving Day engineers did it in fewer than six hours.

In 2004, just a few weeks after landing, the Spirit rover on Mars began spitting out only random bursts of data. Without any clue what was going on, engineers began to trace Spirit’s unintelligible lines of code like bread crumbs, eventually discovering that Spirit sensed a problem with its flash drive and had unsuccessfully attempted to reboot itself more than 60 times to fix it.  Within weeks, the rover was operational.

Indeed, rare is the mission that does not involve some sort of cosmic jerry-rigging. European Space Agency engineers are still working to establish reliable communications between Philae, which landed on a comet in November, and its mothership orbiting the comet. And even the NASA Curiosity rover, which perfectly executed the most thrilling and complicated landing in the history of robotic spaceflight, had a broken arm for several weeks.

Read Full Article: The Christian Science Monitor

NASA Photos Show China’s Plan to Meet New UN Climate Pledge

Image Credit: JESSE ALLEN, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY

NASA satellites show part of China’s plan to meet its ambitious new UN pledge to cut carbon emissions: solar power.

On Tuesday, China said it would halt the rise in its heat-trapping emissions within 15 years and would boost its share of non-fossil fuel energy use to 20 percent by 2030. Its commitment, similar to the one it made last year in a joint U.S. agreement, comes ahead of UN climate talks in Paris in December.

China’s goal reflects how quickly it’s becoming the world’s leader in solar power. It produces two-thirds of all solar panels, and last year, it added more solar capacity than any other country, according to the International Energy Agency or IEA. Germany still has the most cumulative photovoltaic capacity, but second-place China will likely soon close the gap.

The Gobi Desert reveals why. In the northwestern Gansu Province, where sunlight and land are abundant, construction began nearly six years ago on the country’s first large-scale solar power station.

Recent photos from NASA satellites show that solar panels now cover about three times as much Gobi land as they did three years ago. In 2014, the IEA says, China boosted its capacity from solar panels by 37 percent to reach a total capacity of 28.1 gigawatts. And in 2015, during the first quarter alone, China says it’s added another 5 gigawatts of solar capacity.

China’s spending big on renewable energy. Last year, it invested far more— a record $83.3 billion, up 39% from 2013—than any other country, according to a March report by the UN Environment Programme. The U.S., in second place, invested less than half as much.

Not surprisingly, China’s posted the largest gains worldwide in power generation from renewables, including solar, reports the most recent BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

“China is largely motivated by its strong national interests to tackle persistent air pollution problems, limit climate impacts and expand its renewable energy job force,” says Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute. She says China, now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, can meet its climate pledge if it continues its renewables’ push.

“China will work hard to achieve the target at an even earlier date” than 2030, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said in a statement, according to Reuters.

Read Full Article: National Geographic

Agencies, Hoping to Deflect Comets and Asteroids, Step Up Earth Defense

Image Credit: Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto Agency

In grappling with the threat of doomsday rocks from outer space, Hollywood has always been far ahead of the federal government, cranking out thrillers full of swashbuckling heroes, rockets and nuclear blasts that save the planet.

Now Washington is catching up.

On Wednesday, the nation’s agencies that build civilian rockets and nuclear arms sealed an agreement to start working together on planetary defense. The goal is to learn how to better deflect comets and asteroids that might endanger cities and, in the case of very large intruders, the planet as a whole.

“Often, these agencies focus on their own pieces of the puzzle, so anything that brings them together is a good thing,” said Bruce Betts, director of science and technology at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit group that promotes space exploration.

Comets and asteroids are part of the cosmic rubble left over from the birth of the solar system. Comets, made of dirty ice, visit Earth’s neighborhood only when knocked loose from their home orbits beyond Pluto. That makes their movement somewhat unpredictable. Asteroids, made of rock, fly mostly in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Their orbits can be calculated with great precision if astronomers can spot the dim objects.

Rocky debris rains down steadily on Earth, mostly as dust grains and tiny pebbles. But every once in a while a tumbling giant, miles wide, such as the one thought to have done in the dinosaurs, zooms past the planet.

In 2013, this extraterrestrial threat gained new credibility after a 7,000-ton rock — roughly 60 feet wide and technically a meteoroid, smaller than an asteroid — exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, injuring 1,500 people, mainly as shards flew from shattered windows. The dazzling light from the rocky intruder blinded eyes and burned skin even though the temperature that day was far below freezing.

The two agencies — NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration — have long studied such threats on their own. They have surveyed the cosmic debris, designed rocket interceptors and run supercomputer simulations to see if a nuclear blast could nudge a large asteroid off course.

In interviews, federal officials and private experts said the new interagency agreement would deepen the levels of expert cooperation and governmental planning, ultimately increasing the chances of a successful deflection.

“It’s a big step forward,” said Kevin Greenaugh, a senior official at the nuclear security agency. “Whenever you have multiple agencies coming together for the common defense, that’s news.”

But scientists who favor nonnuclear means of asteroid interception said the atomic method would become suitable only if a large threat materialized too quickly for countermeasures that were less powerful.

“I’d like to see it as a last-ditch option,” said H. Jay Melosh, a geophysicist at Purdue University who served on a national panel in 2010 that evaluated the extraterrestrial threats.

The new federal step comes amid rising public and private interest in the loose cannons of the cosmos. This year, NASA unveiled a website that lets visitors explore the cratered surface of Vesta, one of the solar system’s largest asteroids at more than 300 miles across. The agency also released a computer app that — at least in theory — lets amateur astronomers help the agency find new asteroids.

On June 30, experts and advocates, including Brian May, an astrophysicist who is a founding member and the lead guitarist of the rock band Queen, are holding a global awareness campaign called Asteroid Day. The date is the anniversary of the largest asteroid impact in recent history — in 1908, when a cosmic intruder toppled millions of trees in Siberia with a blast judged a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that leveled Hiroshima.

An example of prior federal research comes from the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb. An astrophysicist there, Robert Weaver, ran supercomputer simulations that the lab hailed in an article two years ago as exploratory steps for “Killing Killer Asteroids.” It quoted him as saying such research “will hopefully give policy makers a better understanding of what their options are.”

And eight years ago, NASA scientists detailed plans for an interceptor rocket tipped with a B83 — a warhead about 75 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.

In interviews, officials have declined to say whether any specific arms in the nation’s nuclear arsenal have been set aside for countering extraterrestrial strikes.

“There’s a discussion,” David S.P. Dearborn, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said in an interview, “about what should be held onto” even as the country seeks to modernize and trim its nuclear stockpile in accordance with disarmament treaties.

A global disaster, scientists say, would require the impact of an asteroid or comet having a diameter of at least three-fifths of a mile. So far, they have found about 1,000 such objects that periodically cross the Earth’s path, though none are seen as posing a collision threat in the foreseeable future.

Read Full Article: The New York Times

Study: A third of global groundwater basins are overstressed

Image Credit: Star Tribune

IRVINE, Calif. (AP) — Satellite data show people are overdrawing water from some of the world’s largest groundwater basins.

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine say it’s unclear how much water is left in the most overburdened aquifers. The problem is expected to worsen with climate change and population growth.

Using measurements taken by NASA’s twin Grace satellites, scientists found the most overstressed groundwater basins were located in the driest regions.

Arabian Aquifer System in the Middle East, which serves more than 60 million people, was considered the most stressed in the world followed by the Indus Basin aquifer of northwestern India and Pakistan.

The farm-rich Central Valley in California was considered highly stressed.

Read Full Article: AP

Saturn’s Ghostly Outer Ring Is Much, Much Bigger Than We Thought

Astronomers were stunned in 2009 when they discovered a gargantuan, never-before-seen eighth ring around Saturn. The “Phoebe ring,” as it was dubbed, lies far outside the planet’s seven main ring groups and is made of dark particles that make it hard to spot except in infrared light.

Now a new study reveals the ring is even more impressive — about 30 percent bigger — than previously thought. It covers an area of the sky that’s 7,000 times larger than Saturn itself.

“We knew that the ring was big, but we now know exactly how big it is!” Dr. Douglas P. Hamilton, an astronomy professor at the University of Maryland in College Park and the study’s lead author, told The Huffington Post in an email.

This artist’s conception simulates an infrared view of the giant Phoebe ring.

A second look. Back when they first observed the ring, Hamilton and his colleagues could see only a small cross section of it based on data collected by the Spitzer Space Telescope. For the new study, they analyzed images taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft, which showed the ring in its entirety.

They found that the ring starts at a distance around 100 “Saturn radii,” or around 3.7 million miles, from the planet’s body. And it extends as far as 275 Saturn radii, which is about 10 million miles.

In other words, if you picture Saturn as the size of a basketball, the ring extends around two thirds of the length of a football field away from it, Science reported.

Sifting the dust. The ring is composed mostly of dust particles no bigger than the width of a human hair. Rocks that are soccer-ball-sized or larger, at least 20 centimeters in diameter, make up no more than 10 percent of the ring — which is unusual compared to other rings in the solar system.

Where does the dust come from? Previously, scientists believed that it streams off of Saturn’s moon Phoebe as the satellite gets pelted by comets. Now scientists believe some of it may come from other “hidden” moons that are too small for our telescopes to see, according to NPR.

Read Full Article: The Huffington Post

NASA Pinpoints Earth’s Future Hotspots

Image Credit: Evogreen

Using multiple climate models and hundreds of terabytes of data, NASA has projected global temperatures and rainfall around the world from 2050 until 2100.

A warmer world: average monthly maximum temperatures for July, 2100, according to NASA’s new climate projections.  – Image courtesy of NASA.

The result: Scientists and policymakers can now pull up information that simulates how individual cities and towns may fare on a given day in the distant future. The information could be used to better cope with drought, floods, heat waves and other extreme weather linked to climate change.

The maps were released as part of a White House push today to promote adaptation in developing nations.

This is the first time that scientists have simulated the climate globally in this much detail, using 21 climate models. The resulting maps have a 25-kilometer resolution, which is four times better than available previously.

The effort comes from NASA Earth Exchange, a project set up in 2009 to analyze the massive amounts of data that NASA collects daily.

“It was a big data project before big data projects became popular,” said Tsengdar Lee, high-end computing program manager at NASA.

NASA moved hundreds of terabytes of data collected by satellites and simulated by climate models into a supercomputer at the Ames Research Center in California, and then set it to work crunching numbers.

Emphasis on regions
The scientists wanted to refine existing climate models. The models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called Coupled Model Intercomparison Project-5 (CMIP-5), are the best physical models of climate change available. They have a resolution of 100 to 200 kilometers and are great at simulating global changes. They are less thorough at simulating changes on a regional scale.

Policymakers, however, are most interested in regional predictions.

So, NASA scientists decided to provide this information. They trained the supercomputer’s algorithm to recognize differences between the CMIP-5 models and real-world observations. Then, as the models projected out into the future, the computer corrected the resulting simulations down to 25-kilometer resolution.

NASA simulated the changes assuming that humans will continue to emit carbon at present-day rates (a scenario scientists call RCP 4.5) and under an “extreme” scenario where nations increase their emissions (RCP 8.5).

Under the RCP 8.5 scenario, the July temperature maximums in 2100 across the most densely populated parts of the globe appear to be well above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).

Read Full Article: Scientific American

We STILL Don’t Know What Those Bright Blobs on Ceres Are

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Although NASA’s Dawn mission is now carrying out its second mapping orbit of dwarf planet Ceres, beaming back the highest resolution images of the small world’s surface to date, we’re still none the wiser as to what those weird bright patches are.

“The bright spots in this configuration make Ceres unique from anything we’ve seen before in the solar system,” said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the mission at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The science team is working to understand their source.”

The blobs, which quickly shot to the headlines shortly before Dawn arrived in Ceres orbit in March, have kept their true nature secret. Although planetary physicists have some ideas as to what they may be, these white patches are becoming quite a mystery.

“Reflection from ice is the leading candidate in my mind, but the team continues to consider alternate possibilities, such as salt,” added Russell in Wednesday’s NASA news release. “With closer views from the new orbit and multiple view angles, we soon will be better able to determine the nature of this enigmatic phenomenon.”

Although their nature is not currently known, these newest observations — from 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers) above Ceres — are among the first from the second mapping orbit. The mission will remain at this altitude until June 28 when it will drop even closer to the dwarf planet. By early August, Dawn will be taking observations only 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) from the surface.

From this high-reolution look into the 55 mile (90 kilometer) wide crater containing the bright patches, it is becoming clear that rather than being two amorphous blobs, there is some fine scale structure — there are many individual white patches around a central cluster in two locations. And so far, without knowledge as to what they are, explanations for this fine scale structure will not be forthcoming for some time.

Read Full Article: Discovery News