Unofficial: Cosmic

Eight and a half years into its grand tour of the solar system, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was ready for another encounter. It was Jan. 24, 1986, and soon it would meet the mysterious seventh planet, icy-cold Uranus. Voyager 2 took this image as it approached the planet Uranus on Jan. 14, 1986. The planet’s hazy bluish color is due to the methane in its atmosphere, which absorbs red wavelengths of light. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech Over the next few hours, Voyager 2 flew within 50,600 miles (81,433 kilometers) of Uranus’ cloud tops, collecting data that revealed two new rings, 11 new moons and temperatures below minus 353 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 214 degrees Celsius). The dataset is still the only up-close measurements we have ever made of the planet. Three decades later, scientists reinspecting that data found one more secret. Unbeknownst to the entire space physics community, 34 years ago Voyager 2 flew through a plasmoid, a giant magnetic bubble t...

This illustration depicts NASA's next Mars rover, which launches in 2020. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA's Mars 2020 rover is one step closer to having its own name after 155 students across the U.S. were chosen as semifinalists in the "Name the Rover" essay contest. Just one will be selected to win the grand prize — the exciting honor of naming the rover and an invitation to see the spacecraft launch in July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force The station in Florida. The currently unnamed rover is a robotic scientist weighing more than 2,300 pounds (1,000 kilograms). It will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet's climate and geology, collect samples for a future return to Earth and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. "This rover is the first leg of a round-trip mission to Mars that will advance understanding in key science fields like astrobiology," said Lori Glaze, director of NAS...

In the search for life beyond Earth, astronomers look for planets in a star's "habitable zone" — sometimes nicknamed the "Goldilocks zone" — where temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface to nurture life as we know it. An emerging idea, bolstered by a three-decade-long set of stellar surveys are that there are "Goldilocks stars" — not too hot, not too cool, and above all, not too violent to host life-friendly planets. Because our Sun has nurtured life on Earth for nearly 4 billion years, conventional wisdom would suggest that stars like it would be prime candidates in the search for other potentially habitable worlds. In reality, stars slightly cooler and less luminous than our Sun, classified as K dwarfs, are the true "Goldilocks stars," said Edward Guinan of Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania. "K-dwarf stars are in the 'sweet spot,' with properties intermediate betw...

Approximately the size of a car, the Mars 2020 rover is equipped with six wheels like its predecessor Curiosity. NASA's Mars 2020 will land in a long dried-up delta called Jezero Highlights Mars 2020 has been constructed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA has provided 23 cameras on the rover along with two "ears" Mars 2020 will remain active for at least one Martian year The Mars 2020 rover, which sets off for the Red Planet next year, will not only search for traces of ancient life, but pave the way for future human missions to Mars, NASA scientists said Friday as they unveiled the vehicle. The rover has been constructed in a large, sterile room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, where its driving equipment was given its first successful test last week. Shown to invited journalists on Friday, it is scheduled to leave Earth in July 2020 from Florida's Cape Canaveral, becoming the fifth US rover t...

The High Bay 1 clean room within the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL is seen in this image taken on Nov. 12, 2019. The Mars 2020 rover is visible just above the center. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech Built-in 1961, the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is the cradle of robotic space exploration.   The first probes launched to the Moon, Mars, and Venus were assembled here. So were all of NASA's Mars rovers, Galileo and Cassini (the first orbiters to Jupiter and Saturn), and the twin Voyager spacecraft that are scouting the farthest reaches of the solar system. A new rover, Mars 2020, is going through final testing in this facility before being shipped in February to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where it will launch this summer. The Spacecraft Assembly Facility's construction marks when JPL transitioned from missiles to space exploration, according to JPL historian Erik Conway. "It's where a...

John Michell and dark stars. During 1783, Geologist John Michell wrote a letter to Henry Cavendish outlining the expected properties of dark stars, published by The Royal Society in their 1784 volume. Michell calculated that when the escape velocity at the surface of a star was equal to or greater than the speed of light, the generated light would be gravitationally trapped so that the star would not be visible to a distant astronomer.  "If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun was to exceed that of the Sun is the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertia( A want of power in a body to move itself when at rest or to come to rest when in motion. ), with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own pro...