Gizmorama - February 26, 2014

Good Morning,

NASA has changed the position longest-serving orbital Mars spacecraft and hope of gaining new scientific observations of the Red Planet. We are going to colonize Mars come hell or high water.

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

P.S. Did you miss an issue? You can read every issue from the Gophercentral library of newsletters on our exhaustive archives page. Thousands of issues, all of your favorite publications in chronological order. You can read AND comment. Just click GopherArchives

***
*-- Saturn puts on cosmic light shows of auroras at both poles --*
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA says two space telescopes have captured dramatic images of Saturn putting on a dancing light show of auroras at its poles. While NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting around Earth, was able to observe the northern auroras in ultraviolet wavelengths, the agency's Cassini spacecraft, orbiting around Saturn, got complementary close-up views in infrared, visible-light and ultraviolet wavelengths, NASA said of the images released Tuesday. Cassini could also see northern and southern parts of Saturn that don't face Earth, it said. "Saturn's auroras can be fickle -- you may see fireworks you may see nothing," said Jonathan Nichols of the University of Leicester in England, who led the work on the Hubble images. "In 2013, we were treated to a veritable smorgasbord of dancing auroras, from steadily shining rings to super-fast bursts of light shooting across the pole." The new data yield clues to a longstanding mystery about the atmospheres of giant outer planets, NASA scientists said. "Scientists have wondered why the high atmospheres of Saturn and other gas giants are heated far beyond what might normally be expected by their distance from the sun," said Sarah Badman, a Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team associate at Lancaster University in England. "By looking at these long sequences of images taken by different instruments, we can discover where the aurora heats the atmosphere as the particles dive into it and how long the cooking occurs." Astronomers said they hope additional Cassini work will illuminate how clouds of charged particles move around the planet as it spins and receives blasts of solar material from the sun. "The auroras at Saturn are some of the planet's most glamorous features -- and there was no escaping NASA's paparazzi-like attention," said Marcia Burton, a Cassini scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.


*-- NASA moving orbit of spacecraft circling Mars to do new science --*
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA says it has initiated an orbital move of its longest-serving Mars spacecraft to prepare it for new scientific observations of the Red Planet. The desired change, initiated by a maneuver Tuesday, will occur gradually until the intended new orbit geometry for the Mars Odyssey spacecraft is reached in November 2015 and another maneuver halts the drift, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reported Thursday. The move will enable observation of changing ground temperatures after sunrise and after sunset in thousands of places on Mars, NASA scientists said, providing the first systematic observations of how morning fogs, clouds and surface frost develop in different seasons on the Red Planet. Odyssey, launched in 2011, is the longest-working spacecraft ever sent to Mars. No NASA Mars orbiter has been in a position to observe morning daylight on Mars since the twin Viking orbiters of the 1970s. "We're teaching an old spacecraft new tricks," JPL Odyssey Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut said. "Odyssey will be in position to see Mars in a different light than ever before." At the end of the orbit-adjustment maneuver, Odyssey will have about enough propellant left for nine to 10 years of operation at estimated annual consumption rates, NASA said.

Missed an Issue? Visit the Gizmorama Archives