Exploration Images

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Parker Solar Probe: A surprising image of the night side of Venus, taken during a flyby of the planet last July, showing much more surface detail than expected. Way to overachieve, little space robot. (I went to the PSP launch back in August 2018, so I have a soft spot for this particular space robot.) Here's the original image caption, since I don't think I can summarize what's going on here very well:

When flying past Venus in July 2020, Parker Solar Probe’s WISPR instrument, short for Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow — light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. Bright streaks in WISPR, such as the ones seen here, are typically caused by a combination of charged particles — called cosmic rays — sunlight reflected by grains of space dust, and particles of material expelled from the spacecraft’s structures after impact with those dust grains. The number of streaks varies along the orbit or when the spacecraft is traveling at different speeds, and scientists are still in discussion about the specific origins of the streaks here. The dark spot appearing on the lower portion of Venus is an artifact from the WISPR instrument.

Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher

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Perseverance: Some early Navcam (navigation camera) images taken over the (Earth) weekend on sol 2. Originals are here: [1] [2] [3] [4]. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Perseverance: Some EDL photos I picked out from the rover's Raw Images page. They'd turned off posting new images over the weekend while putting the big EDL movie together, I guess to ensure today's release was a big media event. People were mad about that on the internet for a couple of days, but it looks like it's sorted out now and there are over 4000 images there already, though that includes a bunch they only have thumbnails of so far.

Detail pages for these photos are here: [1] [2] [3] [4]. Image credit for all of these photos: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Perseverance: Amazing descent & landing video taken by the rover's EDL cameras.

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Perseverance: Here's something cool we haven't seen before, a photo from a camera on the rover's descent stage, looking down at the rover.

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| fovarosiblog said: What is hazcam?

Ah, sorry, that's short for "hazard camera". These are wide angle cameras the rover uses while driving, to help avoid driving into boulders, falling off cliffs, getting stuck in sand, etc. Perseverance has three stereo pairs of these: Main and backup pairs on the front end of the rover, and a single pair on the back end. As another example of this, you can look at all the latest hazcam images from the Curiosity rover here.

They use these cameras right after landing because most of the others are located on the rover's camera mast -- the thing that kind of looks like the rover's head and neck -- or its arm, and it'll be a couple of days before they start using either of those.

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Perseverance: Rear hazcam photo taken just after landing. Note that the clear lens caps are still on right now; picture quality should improve once those are removed.

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Ok, so this little space Tumblr sort of went dormant in January 2019, on account of *gestures wildly at everything*. But NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars tomorrow, with 23(!) cameras and two microphones on board, so I figured this would be a good time to dust it off for a while, at least. The video above is the traditional NASA media event they do before most major launches and landings. I usually skip the media questions part of these; doing that cuts the runtime to around 33 minutes instead of an hour, in case you’re in a hurry or whatever.

If the video isn’t detailed enough, here’s a little light reading to tide everyone over until tomorrow:

A paper about the rover’s many engineering cameras. The TL;DR there is that 1) landing videos will be from several angles this time: Looking down from the rover, looking up at the parachutes, looking down at the rover from the skycrane stage, etc. Assuming the landing goes well, obviously. And 2) navigation cameras are color this time, for the practical reason that you can’t tell how dusty your rover is with greyscale photos.

The rover’s eoPortal entry ended up being so detailed they split a couple of sub-pages off of it.

A paper on how you go about choosing a place to land on Mars. Which is not trivial when your project team includes hundreds of scientists across the globe, most of whom have important, strongly-held professional opinions about exactly where and where not to go. Along with hundreds of engineers trying to explain why various things the science folks want are either risky or impossible. TL;DR: There were meetings. Many, many, many meetings. (doc is 87 pages.)

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Posted this on the wrong Tumblr yesterday because rusty at this

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Perseverance: First hazcam photo from the surface of Mars. Woohoo!

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Saturn’s largest moon is a high priority for exploration. Titan is an ocean world and the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere, which supports an Earth-like hydrological cycle of methane clouds, rain, and liquid that flows across the surface to fill lakes and seas. The complex organic material on Titan's surface makes it an ideal destination for studying the conditions and kinds of chemical interactions that occurred before life developed on Earth. Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory space scientist and Dragonfly Principal Investigator Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle describes the science and technology driving the mission, which could revolutionize how we explore the solar system. Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander – proposed to NASA's New Frontiers Program – designed to take advantage of Titan's environment to sample materials and determine surface composition in different settings. This bold mission concept includes the capability to explore diverse locations to characterize the habitability of Titan's environment, to investigate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed, and even to search for chemical signatures that could indicate water-based or hydrocarbon-based life. For more on Dragonfly, visit http://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu.

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Short video about a painting inspired by Parker Solar Probe. This is by Lena Danya, an artist who attended the NASA Social for the probe's launch back in August (which some of you might recall I was at too).

I am always amazed by people who can create things like this. I just remembered a painting class I took in college, which I hadn't thought about in years -- in one project you were supposed to find a photo from a stack of National Geographics and create a watercolor of it, or sort of based on it, more or less. Being a big nerd, I picked the famous Apollo 8 Earthrise photo, and entirely failed to do it justice. First off, a photo that's mostly pitch black is not really a great choice for a watercolor project. And then, once you get to looking at the Earth in that photo, there's just so... much... detail. Whites and blues and greens and browns all swirled together, and you have to get the continents just right or people will make fun of you, and then you realize the moon isn't just a flat single grey either, thanks to sunlight & terrain, and you quickly realize you've bitten off more than you can chew, and you also don't have the hand-eye-paintbrush coordination to even remotely duplicate what you're looking at, and even if you did, the thing is due next Tuesday and your hand keeps cramping and you're rapidly running out of black paint. So I didn't really finish it, but IIRC I got a low-but-passing grade on it, on the theory that trying an overambitious project & bumping into your limits is how you learn things. Or at least it's one way of learning things.

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Fast Radio Bursts are millisecond-duration pulses of unknown origin that were discovered by pulsar astronomers in 2007. A decade on from the discovery, with only 20 further bursts currently known, fast radio bursts remain enigmatic sources which parallel the early days of gamma-ray burst astronomy in the early 1970s. I will tell the story of their discovery, summarize what we know about them so far, describe the science opportunities these bursts present, and make predictions for what we will learn in the next decade.

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Mike Gruntman, Energetic Neutral Atom ENA Imaging: The Next Step, AGU, Fall, 2012. Future development of energetic neutral atom imaging (ENA Imaging) of space plasmas.

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The most energetic particles ever detected present a long standing puzzle in the fields of both astro- and particle physics. With energies of up to 10 million times higher than those produced in the large hadron collider at CERN, these particles are believed to be created in violent astrophysical events before travelling vast distances through extragalactic space to reach us here on Earth. Along with other astrophysical messengers, gamma-rays and neutrinos, UHECR allow us to study the properties of their sources and the medium through which they travel. However, little is known about the details of the phenomenology and it is challenging to build models which can accelerate particles to such high energies under multi-messenger constraints. To make matters worse, UHECR are so rare that they can only be detected indirectly by using the Earth's atmosphere as a giant calorimeter. Research here at KTH focuses on the development of a space-based UHECR observatory as part of the EUSO collaboration, and the data analysis of existing events to investigate potential UHECR sources. The goal in both cases is to improve our understanding of where UHECR originate and their acceleration mechanisms.

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New and improved observational facilities are sampling the night sky with unprecedented temporal cadence and sensitivity across the electromagnetic spectrum. This exercise led to the discovery of new types of astronomical transients and revolutionized our understanding of phenomena that we thought we already knew. In this talk I will review some very recent developments in the field that resulted from the capability to acquire a true panchromatic view of the most extreme stellar deaths in nature.

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Chang'E-4: New panoramas from the lunar far side, January 10th 2019, including the Yutu-2 rover. The 2nd photo was flipped sideways in the source article, and I figured I'd leave that way so hopefully Tumbler won't smoosh it into a little thumbnail like it does with horizontal panoramas.

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Chang'E-4: The Yutu-2 rover isn't wasting any time, & has driven away from the lander toward (but not into) a nearby crater. Reminder that all photos from the far side of the moon are being relayed to earth by the Queqiao spacecraft, which is parked in a halo orbit around the Earth-Moon L2 point, about 61,500km behind the moon. "Halo orbit" means it's about that far behind the moon, but always off to one side or the other from the actual L2 point so it has a line of sight to the Earth. Wouldn't be much of a relay otherwise.