Table of contents for No. 99 in All About Space

Welcome © NASA We're returning to Pluto – and this time we're looking to stay. That's the latest news from NASA as it looks to develop the very first spacecraft that's set to park itself into a loop around the dwarf planet, sometime beyond the 2020s. It comes after the success of New Horizons, which hurtled past Pluto at a speed of 58,500 kilometres (36,400 miles) per hour while busily snapping away, revealing one side of the dwarf planet like never before. On 14 July 2015 the astronomical community truly had the dwarf planet in its crosshairs. We're now intent on a return that'll make its terrain as familiar as that of Mars, the only other planet in the Solar System – bar Earth – that's swarming with spacecraft. Of…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE Alien planet spotted around a white dwarf – a cosmic first Words by Mike Wall © NASA For the first time ever, astronomers have spotted evidence of an exoplanet circling a superdense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf, a new study reports. The vast majority of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, including our own Sun, will end up as white dwarfs. When these stars finish burning their nuclear fuel, they’ll first bloat up as enormous red giants, then eventually collapse down into white dwarfs, which pack about one solar mass into a sphere the size of Earth. Lead scientist Boris Gaensicke from the University of Warwick and his colleagues studied a white dwarf called WDJ0914+1914, which lies about 2,040 light…

Eruptions on asteroid Bennu hint at causes of space rock explosions © NASA For the first time, astronomers have gotten an up-close view of eruptions from an asteroid, shedding light on what might drive such explosions. The findings suggest that many asteroids may be similarly active and reveal that rocks blasting off asteroids may be a new way for meteorites to reach Earth, the scientists wrote in a new study. Previous research found that a small number of asteroids could actively erupt with large amounts of dust and bits of rock. Much remains unknown about what drives such outbursts in active asteroids. Now, scientists have captured images of eruptions from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. “This is the first view of an active asteroid this close up,” Harold Connolly, a sample…

Pluto A new mission to Pluto The new orbiter will be equipped for a longer, more in-depth analysis of the outer Solar System © Adrian Mann © NASA Great weight The payload mass of the orbiter will be some 60 kilograms, which will make it twice that of the current mission. In total the mass will likely be 2,339 kilograms – five times that of New Horizons. A small spacecraft New Horizons was around the size of a grand piano. The planned orbiter will be of a similar scale taken into space on board a Saturn V-class vehicle. Attractive traits A magnetometer couldn’t be implemented on New Horizons for budgetary reasons, but it will allow the orbiter to gather data about Pluto’s core. A mass spectrometer will sample the atmosphere.…

Inside Uranus Planetary core Uranus’ core extends to about a fifth of the planet’s full diameter, and is made of rock, ice and silica. Its temperature is thought to be around 5,000°C (9,032°F). Icy mantle This isn’t ice as we know it. Uranus’ mantle is made up of a hot, dense fluid scientists refer to as a water-ammonia ocean. Upper atmosphere haze The highest parts of Uranus’ atmosphere are thought to contain haze made up of hydrocarbons that obscures features lower in the atmosphere. Potential heat-trapping layer Scientists have not confirmed the existence of a layer around Uranus’ ice layer trapping heat and making it appear cooler, but one could have formed during a giant impact. Atmosphere Uranus looks bluish-green through a telescope thanks to the methane in its atmosphere.…

Future tech The Von Braun Space Station THE VON BRAUN SPACE STATION Bored of city breaks and cruises? 2025 could see the construction of the first hotel in low-Earth orbit © Adrian Mann Imagine substituting sandy beaches for space when it comes to choosing a holiday destination. This is the ambitious idea of a private company known as the Gateway Foundation, which has announced plans to build a hotel in space as early as 2025, partnering up with another company, Orbital Assembly. The Von Braun Space Station will be a doughnut-shaped, rotating spaceport, and senior design architect Tim Alatorre has stated it will be like “going to Disney World”. Its namesake Wernher von Braun was a former Nazi rocket scientist who after World War II became an influential figure for…

The present and future of spaceports With the rise of space tourism and commercial spaceflight, spaceports are popping up all over the globe © Getty 1 SpaceX South Texas Launch Site, United States Also known as the Boca Chica Launch Site, SpaceX has had great support from the Texas state government and will continue with the construction of the spaceport and apply for an FAA license upon completion. 2 Spaceport Sweden, Kiruna Active in the development of commercial manned spaceflight since 2005, Sweden’s contribution to the commercial space industry is its Spaceport Sweden, located in Kiruna in the Arctic Circle, which will hopefully accommodate Virgin Galactic. 3 Blue Origin West Texas Launch Site, United States As New Shepard continues to climb to new heights, Blue Origin will use its FAA-licensed…

ASK Space Our experts answer your questions © NASA/ESO COSMOLOGY What came into existence first: black holes or galaxies? Galaxies, or the ancestors of galaxies as we know them today, likely came first. More specifically, stars – first-generation stars – likely formed first and produced the first ‘artificial’ light in the universe, before any black hole could form. © ESA The first generation of stars likely formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, hosted by dark matter mini-halos. We still don’t know what dark matter is, but we surely think we owe our very existence to it. Without dark matter stars would not be able to form, and the universe as a whole would never witness the invention of chemistry by the supernovae explosions of the…

STARGAZER Moon tour Wolf Finding this lunar crater won’t leave you howling with frustration on cold January nights Many people don't realise that the full Moons seen throughout the 12 calendar months have names, often rooted in nature. These can be traced back to before the Julian calendar was followed and have ties to the Native Americans. For example, May’s full Moon is the ‘Flower Moon’. In November the ‘Hunter’s Moon’ shines over our Bonfire Night celebrations and as December ends late-night Christmas shoppers scurry around looking for last-minute gifts beneath the ‘Cold Moon’. This January, the full Moon that will illuminate our frosty grass and windscreens and the snowmen slumping in our gardens is known as the ‘Wolf Moon’, named by Native Americans after the mournful howling of hungry…

STARGAZER In the shops The latest books, apps, software, tech and accessories for space and astronomy fans alike App Luminos 9.6.2 Cost: £7.99/$9.99 From: iTunes Luminos has all of the workings of an excellent app, allowing you to point and scan as well as identify objects. The app does have some extras over other night-sky apps that many users will certainly appreciate. This includes a feature that allows you to mark targets as you find them in the night sky, also recording the date and allowing you to add some observer's notes. Over other apps that we’ve used, there is a lot more in the way of objects – including asteroids and satellites – among others in the catalogue. A feature that we enjoyed in particular was being able to…

Lakes may bubble up into ‘magic islands’ on Saturn’s Titan Words by Meghan Bartels © NASA/JPL-Caltech Champagne is supposed to be bubbly. So is a foaming bath. But a mixture designed to mimic the frigid lakes on an alien moon? That’s a little more surprising. Especially when those bubbles come out of nowhere and explode. But that’s what Kendra Farnsworth and her colleagues found during a set of experiments designed to help the team understand how compounds like those found on Titan interact. The accidental bubble discovery could help explain one of the mysteries spotted by NASA’s Cassini mission – ‘magic islands’, bright patches on radar images that suddenly disappeared. “At the beginning, it wasn’t the main goal of the study, but it was one of those really surprising results,”…

Inside Pluto Just what is this far-flung celestial body actually made up of? Rocky core At Pluto’s heart is a dense, rocky core that is said to be 1,700 kilometres (1,056 miles) in diameter. That makes up some 70 per cent of the dwarf planet’s overall diameter of 2,370 kilometres (1,473 miles). On the surface With minimal air pressure Pluto is certainly no place for humans. The surface has valleys, frozen nitrogen gas plains, craters up to 260 kilometres (160 miles) in diameter and mountains that are as tall as three kilometres (1.9 miles). A covering shell Methane and nitrogen frost coat Pluto’s surface, and there is a possibility that it is creating a shell across the dwarf planet. New Horizons showed that water ice was widespread across the surface.…

Mapped out Only 40 per cent of Pluto has been mapped, but it shows some distinctive regions © NASA Lowell Regio Here at the northern ice cap, the Lowell Regio – named after Percival Lowell in whose observatory Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto – has long canyons that run vertically across the polar area about 75-kilometres (47-miles) wide. Inanna Fossa Long, narrow depressions are commonplace on Pluto, and they are believed to have been formed from a number of geological processes which can include subsidence and faulting. Al-Idrisi Montes The Al-Idrisi Montes mountain range is made of frozen water and has been named in honour of the Arab map-maker and geographer Ash-Sharīf al-Idrīsī. Pandemonium Dorsa The Pandemonium Dorsa is a mountain range which follows the naming convention of ridges in being…

Focus on Ice fossils ICE FOSSILS REVEAL CLUES TO OUR PAST An ancient space rock's artefacts have revealed tantalising insight into the conditions of our early Solar System Reported by Chelsea Gohd © NASA/JPL-Caltech Scientists have discovered ancient asteroid ice fossils that could reveal what our Solar System was like billions of years ago. In a new study, scientists analysed a 4.6-billion-year-old primitive meteorite, called Acfer 094, that crash-landed in the Sahara Desert in Algeria in 1990. A primitive meteorite is a rocky remnant of the solar nebula, or the gaseous cloud that some say condensed into the objects in the Solar System, that has fallen to Earth. Within the meteorite scientists found what seem to be ice fossils, and the discovery is helping to illuminate how asteroids formed in…

Einstein’s greatest letters A letter sent to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed by Albert Einstein, details uranium as a new and important source of energy in the “immediate future” Albert Einstein pens a romantic letter to Russian spy Margarita Konenkova © Rimonda Miara / Getty This signed letter dates back to 1928 and concerns the formalisation of the ‘Third Stage of the Theory of Relativity’ © Menahem Kahana / Getty A letter signed by Albert Einstein to Ernst Gabor Strauss about the unified field theory © Jacques Demarthon / Getty…

How the Solar Orbiter will observe the Sun's poles 1 After the first year By November 2021, SolO will have conducted two gravity assist manoeuvres around Venus and one around Earth in order to achieve its orbit in the inner Solar System. 2 Two years later The first Venus gravity assist to provide inclination will be in September 2022, over two years after the craft was launched. 3 Five years later In 2025 SolO will perform its fourth flyby of Venus in order to take its inclination up to 17 degrees. This is a similar inclination to Pluto’s orbit. 4 Seven years later Once the nominal mission duration is completed, which is seven years after launch, the spacecraft will have reached an inclination of 25 degrees. 5 Ten years later…

Mars’ oxygen MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE WHAT’S WRONG WITH MARS’ OXYGEN LEVELS? The Curiosity rover has been amassing data that shows an unexpected change in the Red Planet's O2 Reported by David Crookes © Alamy Curiosity has been trundling across the surface of Mars since 2012, revealing a lot of detail about the Martian climate and the Red Planet's geology. So far the rover has proven to be invaluable in showing that Mars could have once sustained life. It has uncovered evidence of ancient persistent water flows, discovered organic carbon in rocks and found two forms of radiation that could pose potential health risks to astronauts. But its work continues to astound and confound. In November 2019, scientists revealed the results of a study of Curiosity's data that…

INSIDE THE RED PLANET How is Mars' composition contributing to the atmosphere? Ice caps Mars has two permanent polar ice caps that are a mixture of water ice and carbon dioxide ice – carbon dioxide being one carbon and two oxygen atoms. Carbon dioxide ice vaporises in summer and freezes in winter. Deep in the dirt Hydrogen peroxide – which can decompose into water and oxygen gas – is found in the Martian soil alongside perchlorates, which also contain oxygen. Rusty surface Since the Martian soil contains iron oxide, a product of the reaction between iron and oxygen, it lends a rusty colour to the surface of the planet. The dust is blown into the atmosphere, colouring the sky too. Surround mantle Beneath the crust is the mantle, comprising of…

Chaotic universe CHAOTIC UNIVERSE Do we finally have a handle on chaos theory – and how it influences the world around us? Reported by Colin Stuart © Tobias Roetsch When it comes to surviving in space, the tiniest things can be the difference between life and death. As Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield said: “An astronaut who doesn’t sweat the small stuff is a dead astronaut.” That may be the case for human space travel, but astronomers are increasingly suspecting the same mantra also applies to the wider universe. When it comes to the cosmos, it seems chaos theory is king. Chaos theory traces its origins way back to the 19th century. French polymath Henri Poincaré was attempting to win a prize of 2,500 crowns – a third of a professor’s…

Why is chaos theory important? Solving it could help us unlock the secrets of the universe © Universal Pictures What is chaos theory? Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with patterns that repeat in complex systems. Often small changes in the system can soon grow to make a big difference later down the line. Can it predict the future? Not quite. With some systems – like a single planet orbiting a star – it is very easy to work out where the planet will be at any given time in the future. Yet as soon as you add a third object that reliable behaviour becomes unstable and much harder to predict. Chaos theory is all about looking for hidden patterns to get a better handle on future…

Your astrophotography of the month Send your astrophotography images to space@spaceanswers.com for a chance to see them featured in All About Space “The Southern Hemisphere sky is teeming with fascinating objects” Ian Griffin Dunedin, New Zealand “Just over three years ago, a new job meant that I moved from Oxford in the UK to Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand. Since moving here I’ve developed a passion for astrophotography both with and without a telescope. The Southern Hemisphere sky is teeming with fascinating objects, and it’s a real pleasure to live in a part of the world where the centre of the galaxy passes overhead in winter. Here in Dunedin we also get frequent displays of the aurora australis, which can look truly spectacular against the backdrop of…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE ©NASA Soaring through space This unique shot of ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano performing his third spacewalk puts the heights at which astronauts need to operate into perspective. In this recent image, Parmitano is pictured servicing an important instrument for studying the universe’s mysterious cosmic rays: the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer AMS-02. This endeavour took roughly five hours to complete as it was the most important of the four planned spacewalks to return the cosmic-ray hunting machine to its best. The cosmic influencer This is a composite image containing both X-ray (red) and radio-emission (blue) data which was taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation's Karl Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. Together they provide vital evidence that…

Pluto Breakthrough discoveries What has New Horizons already told scientists about Pluto and the Kuiper belt? A complex world With mountains, faults, polar caps, ice volcanoes, ground fogs and more, Pluto took even the New Horizons team by surprise. Meanwhile, large chasms and a north pole covered with material that had escaped from Pluto’s atmosphere were seen on the moon Charon. © NASA Ocean of liquid water New Horizons showed that the giant glacier Sputnik Planitia – a vast, deep layer of nitrogen ice – is aligned with Pluto’s tidal axis, with Charon overhead exerting a gravitational pull. To have moved there via tidal forces, a liquid-water ocean layer would need to be under the crust. © NASA Loss of nitrogen is slow The gravity on Pluto is 0.066 that…

Galileo’s planet: Jupiter Jupiter is the Solar System’s largest planet. Its volume is 1,321-times larger than Earth’s and its mass is 318 times ours. It’s named after the Roman god Jupiter, the god of sky and thunder. It’s the fourth-brightest object in the sky after the Sun, Moon and Venus. Jupiter has 53 confirmed moons, its four largest being Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. The ‘King of the Solar System’ has faint dusty rings. They weren’t discovered until 1979. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a storm that’s large enough to engulf the Earth. It’s been swirling for at least 300 years. It has the fastest rotation in the Solar System, completing a spin in less than ten hours – fast enough to cause a bulge at the equator. It’s…

User Manual Solar Orbiter USER MANUAL Solar Orbiter Early 2020 will see the launch of an ambitious mission to observe the poles of the Sun for the first time ever © ESA In February 2020, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) highly anticipated Solar Orbiter will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on top of an Atlas V rocket. Although this mission is led by the ESA, it has had strong contributions from NASA, including the launch site and rocket. This is one of the missions that constitutes the ESA’s Cosmic Vision programme, and will investigate the only star in our Solar System, the Sun. Not only is it equipped with ten state-of-the-art instruments – designed to investigate everything from coronal mass ejections (CMEs) to the solar wind –…

HOW TO… Protect a spacecraft from the Sun 1 Knowing the enemy The spacecraft will be in the midst of an extremely harmful environment. There will be unbearable temperatures and radiation peppering the spacecraft, so a set of precautions are needed in order to protect it. © ESA 2 The first line of defence The heat shield will guard against direct radiation, which will come in handy when the spacecraft is at its perihelion. This heat shield will be facing the Sun at all times during its orbit, so it will be constantly bombarded. © ESA 3 Multi-layer insulation As the name suggests, the spacecraft is coated in multiple layers of material that will allow the contents to be guarded against temperatures that reach as high at…

MISSION PROFILE Meet the spacecraft keeping an eye on Mars Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity measured the gases in Mars' atmosphere using the quadrupole mass spectrometer instrument in the Sample Analysis at Mars portable chemistry lab, with the data showing the amount of oxygen rises in spring and summer, although not relative to how much carbon dioxide there is in the air. © NASA/ JPL-Caltech Viking landers Two Viking landers carried out biological experiments in 1976 in a bid to find biosignatures that could point to microbial life. They were able to measure the gases in Mars' atmosphere, but only over the course of a few Martian days, which was nowhere near enough to study seasonal fluctuations. Source: Wiki© Don Davis Mars Scout Program In 2008, Phoenix landed on Mars to…

Applying chaos to the weather The mind-bending theory helps us to get more of a handle on our planet’s complex atmosphere Our complex systems The Earth’s weather system is incredibly complex, with many different particles interacting in a variety of ways. Jet streams These fast-moving channels of air affect the weather in different parts of the world depending on their speed, latitude and movement. Chaos solves the weather Chaos theory attempts to explain underlying patterns in this seemingly random maelstrom of data. Eyes on Earth Many satellites in orbit have been launched to view our weather from above and on a grander scale. Temperature, pressure and wind speed Even small variations in temperature, pressure or wind speed can build up into big differences elsewhere on the planet.…

Spaceports THE RISE OF THE SPACEPORT Increasing commercial space activity has called for more spaceports, and the world has answered Reported by Lee Cavendish Put yourself in the era of the 1950s and 1960s: space is a place exclusive to government agencies as the United States and the Soviet Union lock horns in the Space Race. Fast forward 50 years and space is now open to anyone and everyone, and commercial aerospace companies are making a real surge forward in making space tourism a real thing, no longer in the realm of science fiction. Three major players in the game are SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. All three are owned by their respective billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson. These three companies are on the…

Telescope trouble WHAT’S WRONG WITH MY TELESCOPE? Views not clear, struggling with your mount or can’t find an object? We’ve got the answers to your observing conundrums Written by Mark Thompson Newcomers to astronomy are at some point likely to make that all-important purchase and buy a telescope. There are loads of models to choose from and the decision can be a daunting one. Seeking the advice of members of your local astronomy club or society is a wise one because they will have a wealth of experience and even equipment you could look at and maybe even try before you buy. Whether you choose a reflecting telescope that uses mirrors to focus incoming starlight or a refractor that employs lenses, getting to this stage means you are well on…