Astronomy and Planetary Science Thread

Planetary scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered how Venus, Earth’s scalding and uninhabitable neighbor, became so dry.

The new study fills in a big gap in what the researchers call “the water story on Venus.” Using computer simulations, the team found that hydrogen atoms in the planet’s atmosphere go whizzing into space through a process known as “dissociative recombination”—causing Venus to lose roughly twice as much water every day compared to previous estimates.
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www.eurekalert.org

Venus has almost no water. A new study may reveal why

Billions of years ago, Venus may have harbored as much water as Earth. Today, almost all of it has disappeared. A new study may help to explain why.
www.eurekalert.org

Unfortunately the link to the related paper doesn’t work.
 
In a recent publication, the experts offer a new explanation for this behavior. They propose that a “natal kick” – a displacement during formation due to asymmetric mass loss observed in white dwarfs – might be responsible for the dynamics that lead to these celestial bodies consuming nearby planetesimals.

The team’s computer simulations showed that in 80% of scenarios, this kick resulted in the elongation and alignment of the orbits of comets and asteroids within 30 to 240 astronomical units of the white dwarf. Remarkably, about 40% of the consumed planetesimals originated from retrograde, or counter-rotating, orbits.
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www.earth.com

Hungry white dwarf stars eat heavy metals

White dwarfs, the remnants of stars like our Sun but only about the size of Earth, make up 97% of our galaxy's stars.
www.earth.com www.earth.com

Related paper:

 
Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope may have detected atmospheric gases surrounding 55 Cancri e, a hot rocky exoplanet 41 light-years from Earth. This is the best evidence to date for the existence of any rocky planet atmosphere outside our solar system.

Renyu Hu from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is lead author on a paper published today in Nature. “Webb is pushing the frontiers of exoplanet characterization to rocky planets,” Hu said. “It is truly enabling a new type of science.”
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…

The team thinks that the gases blanketing 55 Cancri e would be bubbling out from the interior, rather than being present ever since the planet formed. “The primary atmosphere would be long gone because of the high temperature and intense radiation from the star,” said Bello-Arufe. “This would be a secondary atmosphere that is continuously replenished by the magma ocean. Magma is not just crystals and liquid rock; there’s a lot of dissolved gas in it, too.”
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science.nasa.gov

NASA’s Webb Hints at Possible Atmosphere Surrounding Rocky Exoplanet - NASA Science

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope may have detected atmospheric gases surrounding 55 Cancri e, a hot rocky exoplanet 41 light-years from Earth. This is the best evidence to date for the existence of any rocky planet atmosphere outside our solar system. Renyu Hu from NASA’s Jet...
science.nasa.gov science.nasa.gov

Related paper:

A secondary atmosphere on the rocky Exoplanet 55 Cancri e - Nature

Characterizing rocky exoplanets is a central endeavor of astronomy, and yet the search for atmospheres on rocky exoplanets has hitherto resulted in either tight upper limits on the atmospheric mass1–3 or inconclusive results4–6. The 1.95-REarth and 8.8-MEarth planet 55 Cnc e, with a...
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
If true Flyaway this will quite possibly be the discovery of the century so far. Next step try to find out if 55 Cancri e has any prospects of alien life on the surface and to see how much Oxygen and Nitrogen the atmosphere has.
 
FighterJock said:
If true Flyaway this will quite possibly be the discovery of the century so far. Next step try to find out if 55 Cancri e has any prospects of alien life on the surface and to see how much Oxygen and Nitrogen the atmosphere has.
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As the article says absolutely no chance of life as rocky is a poor choice of words as the surface is probably a molten sea of magma.
 
After Ingenuity, presentations at the 2024 Transformative Vertical Flight conference devoted to helicopter research.

www.scientificamerican.com

NASA’s Plans for Next-Generation Mars Helicopters Are Up in the Air

After the spectacular success of the first-ever “Marscopter,” mission planners have soaring ambitions for follow-up flying machines
www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com

You may hit a paywall, so...

Ingenuity’s achievements have sparked something of a renaissance in helicopter science, and NASA has developed lists of specifications for several more planetary helicopters, most of which will never be built. But each new configuration helps NASA to learn and iterate, with the hope of identifying the best possible designs for a range of challenging conditions.
The most developed plans include Dragonfly, which recently received the green light to head for Saturn’s largest moon, and the Sample Recovery Helicopter (SRH), which faces an unclear future as a potential part of the space agency’s troubled Mars Sample Return (MSR) program. Other possibilities include a few concept helicopters—for instance, the Mars Science Helicopter, which wouldn’t need a rover or lander as a “mothership,” and the Planetary Telemetric Helicopter for Investigation and Analysis (PYTHIA), designed to travel down the Red Planet’s giant lava tubes.

[...]

On a more mundane but equally important note, Warmbrodt says the Ingenuity team was elated to confirm that consumer electronics could handle interplanetary exploration. Ingenuity’s brains came from the equivalent of a simple mobile phone processor, which was able to withstand the extremes of a rocket launch and a Mars landing, as well the low pressure and variable temperatures of the alien world’s surface—a fact that came up a few times during talks at the conference.Previously, NASA had only used custom hardware which required costly testing to prove spaceworthiness. The ability to use commercially available components, Warmbrodt says, would provide a huge cost benefit in future designs.

[...]

At the moment, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has updated the MSR [Mars Sample Return] design specifications in a way that “does not allow accommodation of helicopters.” It also included a back door, however, that would allow NASA to potentially squeeze in a helicopter “for added risk reduction,” albeit with a tighter budget. The answer to the question of when helicopters will once again fly through Mars’s not-so-friendly skies is up in the air.

[Some stuff about Dragonfly - nothing specifically new in this article]

Proposed Mars Science Helicopter:

science.nasa.gov

Model of Proposed Mars Science Helicopter - NASA Science

A model of NASA’s Mars Science Helicopter concept is shown in this photo.
science.nasa.gov science.nasa.gov


In late 2023 Grip left the Ingenuity program to become chief engineer for the Mars Science Helicopter (MSH). He said the design for the MSH hasn’t been completely settled yet, but it is likely to be the first Mars-bound mission to abandon the stacked rotor blade configuration and instead use a hexacopter design that will space six rotor blades around the craft’s body. Standing a little more than four feet tall and weighing just five pounds, it will also be larger and heavier than Ingenuity and able to carry a gross weight of around 68 pounds, including about 18 pounds of payload.

“The best way to think about it is that it’s one concept that has received a fair bit of attention and study over several years,” Grip says, “but it’s not an approved mission.”

Another promising concept is PYTHIA, designed to navigate Mars’s caves. In the past, active volcanoes on Mars pushed hot lava to the surface via tunnels. After the volcanoes cooled, the tunnels hardened into large lava tubes.

At the conference, a NASA team presented PYTHIA’s proposed design of a smaller drone body with four rotors and eight blades. A prospective landing site has already been selected: Arsia Mons, Mars’s third-highest point of elevation, at around 38,000 feet. Thanks to Ingenuity’s flight data, engineers know the extremely low air pressure that PYTHIA will face and have modeled how to compensate so it can navigate such heights.

47814_PIA25661.jpg
 

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