Eyewitness states:
Observing the sky with the green filter of it panoramic camera, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit came across a surprise: a streak across the sky.

The streak, seen in the middle of this mosaic of images taken by the navigation and panoramic cameras, was probably the brightest object in the sky at the time.

Scientists theorize that the mystery line could be either a meteorite or one of seven out-of-commission spacecraft still orbiting Mars.

Because the object appeared to move 4 degrees of an arc in 15 seconds it is probably not the Russian probes Mars 2, Mars 3, Mars 5, or Phobos 2; or the American probes Mariner 9 or Viking 1.

That leaves Viking 2, which has a polar orbit that would fit with the north-south orientation of the streak. In addition, only Viking 1 and 2 were left in orbits that could produce motion as fast as that seen by Spirit. Said Mark Lemmon, a rover team member from Texas A&M University, Texas,

“Is this the first image of a meteor on Mars, or an image of a spacecraft sent from another world during the dawn of our robotic space exploration program? We may never know, but we are still looking for clues.” Mark Lemmon – Mars Rover Team Member ( NASA Photo Link: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/20040311a/12-ml-03-streak-A067R1_br.jpg )

Here is a video, what do you think?

Even when both poles of the planet undergo ozone losses during the winter, the Arctic’s ozone depletion tends to be milder and shorter-lived than the Antarctic’s. This is because the three key ingredients needed for ozone-destroying chemical reactions — chlorine from human-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), frigid temperatures and sunlight — are not usually present in the Arctic at the same time: the northernmost latitudes are generally not cold enough when the sun reappears in the sky in early spring. Still, in 2011, ozone concentrations in the Arctic atmosphere were about 20 percent lower than its late winter average.

The new study shows that, while chlorine in the Arctic stratosphere was the ultimate culprit of the severe ozone loss of winter of 2011, unusually cold and persistent temperatures also spurred ozone destruction. Furthermore, uncommon atmospheric conditions blocked wind-driven transport of ozone from the tropics, halting the seasonal ozone resupply until April.

“You can safely say that 2011 was very atypical: In over 30 years of satellite records, we hadn’t seen any time where it was this cold for this long,” said Susan E. Strahan, an atmospheric scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and main author of the new paper, which was recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.

“Arctic ozone levels were possibly the lowest ever recorded, but they were still significantly higher than the Antarctic’s,” Strahan said. ” There was about half as much ozone loss as in the Antarctic and the ozone levels remained well above 220 Dobson units, which is the threshold for calling the ozone loss a ‘hole’ in the Antarctic — so the Arctic ozone loss of 2011 didn’t constitute an ozone hole.”

Maps of ozone concentrations over the Arctic come from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite. The left image shows March 19, 2010, and the right shows the same date in 2011. March 2010 had relatively high ozone, while March 2011 has low levels – Credit: NASA/Goddard

The majority of ozone depletion in the Arctic happens inside the so-called polar vortex: a region of fast-blowing circular winds that intensify in the fall and isolate the air mass within the vortex, keeping it very cold.

Most years, atmospheric waves knock the vortex to lower latitudes in later winter, where it breaks up. In comparison, the Antarctic vortex is very stable and lasts until the middle of spring. But in 2011, an unusually quiescent atmosphere allowed the Arctic vortex to remain strong for four months, maintaining frigid temperatures even after the sun reappeared in March and promoting the chemical processes that deplete ozone.

The vortex also played another role in the record ozone low.

“Most ozone found in the Arctic is produced in the tropics and is transported to the Arctic,” Strahan said. “But if you have a strong vortex, it’s like locking the door — the ozone can’t get in.”

To determine whether the mix of human-made chemicals and extreme cold or the unusually stagnant atmospheric conditions was primarily responsible for the low ozone levels observed, Strahan and her collaborators used an atmospheric chemistry and transport model (CTM) called the Global Modeling Initiative (GMI) CTM. The team ran two simulations: one that included the chemical reactions that occur on polar stratospheric clouds, the tiny ice particles that only form inside the vortex when it’s very cold, and one without. They then compared their results to real ozone observations from NASA’s Aura satellite.

The results from the first simulation reproduced the real ozone levels very closely, but the second simulation showed that, even if chlorine pollution hadn’t been present, ozone levels would still have been low due to lack of transport from the tropics. Strahan’s team calculated that the combination of chlorine pollution and extreme cold temperatures were responsible for two thirds of the ozone loss, while the remaining third was due to the atypical atmospheric conditions that blocked ozone resupply.

Once the vortex broke down and transport from the tropics resumed, the ozone concentrations rose quickly and reached normal levels in April 2011.

Strahan, who now wants to use the GMI model to study the behavior of the ozone layer at both poles during the past three decades, doesn’t think it’s likely there will be frequent large ozone losses in the Arctic in the future.

“It was meteorologically a very unusual year, and similar conditions might not happen again for 30 years,” Strahan said. “Also, chlorine levels are going down in the atmosphere because we’ve stopped producing a lot of CFCs as a result of the Montreal Protocol. If 30 years from now we had the same meteorological conditions again, there would actually be less chlorine in the atmosphere, so the ozone depletion probably wouldn’t be as severe.”

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center [March 11, 2013]

The C/2011 L4, also known as Comet Pan-Starrs, is making a rare visit to the inner solar system in the middle of this week, and will fly past the sun.

But experts have warned that amateur stargazers not to try and see it too soon.

Rev Kate Kay, chief astronomer at the Norman Lockyer Observatory in Sidmouth, Devon, said: “It’s going around the sun, and there is always a danger that if you try to look at it when it is near the sun, you are going to do some damage to your eyes.

“We’re hoping to get our first glimpses and photographs of it on Tuesday and Wednesday when it’s away from the sun, and near the new moon. If people look then for the moon, just to the right of it, they may see a little white smudge, hopefully with a nice tail.

Comet C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) is a non-periodic comet discovered in June 2011 that is expected to be visible to the naked eye when it is near perihelion in March 2013. The comet was discovered using the Pan-STARRS telescope located near the summit of Haleakala, on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

“With any luck this bad weather may have improved by then, allowing young people with stronger eyes to see it, or older people with binoculars.”

The comet takes its name from the Hawaiian telescope which astronomers used to spot it in June 2011.

Members of the Flamsteed Astronomy Society, part of the Royal Observatory, planned to look for the comet from Blackheath in south east London on Friday, or Saturday if the weather is bad on Friday.

Joint vice chairman Grey Lipley said: “If you are going to try to find the comet while it is near the sun, you should wait until the sun is fully set. But it is going to be difficult to see it given the poor weather at the moment.”

Supernova explosions of massive stars are common in spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, where new stars are forming all the time. They are almost never seen in elliptical galaxies where star formation has nearly ceased. As a result, astronomers were surprised to find a young-looking supernova in an old galaxy. Supernova PS1-12sk, discovered with the Pan-STARRS telescope on Haleakala, is rare in more ways than one.

“This supernova is one-of-a-kind,” said Nathan Sanders of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), lead author of the discovery paper. “And it’s definitely in the wrong neighborhood.”

Based on the presence of helium and other features, PS1-12sk is classified as a very rare Type Ibn supernova — only the sixth such example found out of thousands of supernovae. Although the origin of this supernova type is unclear, the most likely cause seems to be the explosion of a massive star that previously ejected massive amounts of helium gas, much like Eta Carinae’s Homunculus Nebula.

That origin was supported by the fact that the five previous Type Ibn supernovae were all found in galaxies like the Milky Way that are actively forming stars. (Since massive stars don’t live long, they don’t stray far from where they are born before exploding.)

PS1-12sk PS1-12sk, the yellow dot at image center (circled), is classified as a very rare Type Ibn supernova – only the sixth such example found out of thousands of supernovae. It was discovered on the outskirts of a bright elliptical galaxy (the yellow blob to the upper left of the supernova) located about 780 million light-years from Earth. A Type Ibn supernova is thought to come from the explosion of a young, massive star. However, the site of the explosion shows no signs of recent star formation, and a supernova from a massive star has never before been seen in a galaxy of this type – Credit: CfA / PS1 Science Consortium

PS1-12sk is different. It was found on the outskirts of a bright elliptical galaxy located about 780 million light-years from Earth. The site of the explosion shows no signs of recent star formation, and a supernova from a massive star has never before been seen in a galaxy of this type.

“It could be that we simply got very lucky with this discovery. But luck favors the prepared,” said second author Alicia Soderberg of the CfA.

The finding suggests that the host galaxy might be hiding a star factory, allowing it to form massive stars where none were expected. Alternatively, PS1-12sk might have an entirely different origin such as a collision of two white dwarfs, one of which was helium-rich.

“Is this a runaway star from another star formation site? Is it a very local bit of star formation? Is it a different way for such a supernova to occur? None of these seems very likely so we have a real puzzle,” said co-author John Tonry (University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy).

The research has been submitted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics [March 07, 2013]

Chief among them: an ephemeral third ring of radiation, previously unknown to science, surrounding our planet.

NASA says the discovery was a lucky one. Just three days after the Van Allen probes launched, a team of researchers led by planetary scientist Daniel Baker made an unusual last-minute request that their radiation belts (REPT) be turned on earlier than scheduled, in hopes that their observations would overlap with those of another mission called SAMPEX. What happened next was entirely unexpected. Continue via, IO9

“Over its lifetime, a black hole can release more energy than all the stars in a galaxy combined,” said Roger Blandford, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science. “Black holes have a major impact on the formation of galaxies and the environmental growth and evolution of those galaxies.”

Gravitational forces grow so strong close to a black hole that even light cannot escape from within, hence the difficulty in observing them directly. Scientists infer facts about black holes by their influence on the astronomical objects around them: the orbit of stars and clumps of detectable energy. With this information in hand, scientists create computer models to understand the data and to make predictions about the physics of distant regions of space. However, models are only as good as their assumptions.

“All tests of general relativity in the weak gravity field limit, like in our solar system, fall directly along the lines of what Einstein predicted,” explained Jonathan McKinney, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park. “But there is another regime — which has yet to be tested, and which is the hardest to test — that represents the strong gravitational field limit. And according to Einstein, gravity is strongest near black holes.”

This makes black holes the ultimate experimental testing grounds for Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

While black holes cannot be observed, they are typically accompanied by other objects with distinctive features that can be seen, including accretion disks, which are circling disks of superhot matter on our side of the black hole’s “event horizon”; and relativistic jets, high-powered streams of ionized gases that shoot hundreds of thousands of light years across the sky.

3-D snapshot for an evolved Black Hole (BH) model. The disk and jet near the BH are aligned with the BH spin axis and point mostly in and out of the figure plane, whereas at larger distances the jet points roughly halfway between the BH spin axis and the disk’s rotational axis (pointing along the orange cylinder) – Credit: University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center

In a paper published in Science in January 2013, McKinney, Tchekhovskoy and Blandford predicted the formation of accretion disks and relativistic jets that warp and bend more than previously thought, shaped both by the extreme gravity of the black hole and by powerful magnetic forces generated by its spin. Their highly detailed models of the black hole environment contribute new knowledge to the field.

For decades, a simplistic view of the accretion disks and polar jets reigned. It was widely believed that accretion disks sat like flat plates along the outer edges of black holes and that jets shot straight out perpendicularly. However, new 3D simulations performed on the powerful supercomputers of the National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and NASA overturned this oversimplified view of jets and disks.

The simulations show that the jet is aligned with the black hole’s spin near the black hole but that it gradually gets pushed by the disk material and becomes parallel to (but offset from) the disk’s rotational axis at large distances. The interaction between the jet and disk leaves a warp in the accretion disk density.

“An important aspect that determines jet properties is the strength of the magnetic field threading the black hole,” said Alexander Tchekhovskoy, a post-doctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. “While in previous works it was a free parameter, in our series of works the field is maximum: it is as strong as a black hole’s gravity pull on the disk.”

Still shot from Magneto-Spin Alignment Effect Movie (Black Hole Jet). Visualizations by Ralf Kaehler and Jonathan C. McKinney.

In the simulations, the twisting energy grows so strong that it actually powers the jet. In fact, the jet can reorient the accretion disk, rather than the other way around, as was thought previously.

“People had thought that the disk was the dominant aspect,” McKinney said. “It was the dog and the jet was the wagging tail. But we found that the magnetic field builds up to become stronger than gravity, and then the jet becomes the dog and the disk becomes the wagging tail. Or, one can say the dog is chasing its own tail, because the disk and jet are quite balanced, with the disk following the jet — it’s the inverse situation to what people thought.”

What does this have to do with Einstein and his theory of general relativity?

Astronomers are closer than ever to being able to see the details of the jets and accretion disks around black holes. In a September 2012 paper in Science, Sheperd Doeleman of MIT reported the first images of the jet-launching structure near the supermassive black hole, M87, at the center of a neighboring galaxy, captured using the Event Horizon Telescope, a very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) array composed of four telescopes at three geographical locations. It constituted a small sliver of a vast skyscape, yet the results give astronomers like McKinney, Tchekhovskoy and Blandford the hope that they will get their first comprehensive glimpse into the black hole’s neighborhood in the next three to five years.

“We’ll see the gases swirl around the black hole and other optical effects that will be signatures of a black holes in spacetime that one can look out for,” said Blandford.

The observations will either match models like theirs, or they will be different. Both outcomes will tell researchers a lot.

“If you don’t have an accurate model and anything can happen as far as you understand, then you’re not going to be able to make any constraints and prove one way or another whether Einstein was right,” McKinney explained. “But if you have an accurate model using Einstein’s equations, and you observe a black hole that is very different from what you expected, then you can begin to say that he may be wrong.”

The model Blandford and others generated using supercomputing simulations will help serve that comparative role. But they need to add one crucial element to make the simulations meaningful: a way of translating the physics of the black hole system into a visual signal as it would be seen from the vantage point of our telescopes, billions of light years away.

“We’re in the process of making our simulations shine, so they can be compared with observations,” McKinney said, “not only to test our ideas of how these disks and jets work, but ultimately to test general relativity.”

Source: University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center [February 21, 2013]

After analyzing Hubble Space Telescope images of star cluster NGC 1818 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University in Beijing found more binary star systems toward the periphery of cluster than in the center — the opposite of what they expected. The surprising distribution of binaries is thought to result from complex interactions among stars within young clusters.

The team’s finding will be published in the March 1 print issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is now online.

In the dynamic environment of a star cluster, high-mass stars are thought to gravitate toward the center of a cluster when they give a ‘kick’ to lower-mass stars and lose energy, explained KIAA Prof. Richard de Grijs, who led the study. This leads them to sink to the cluster center, while the lower-mass stars gain energy and might move to orbits at greater distances from the cluster core. Astronomers call this process “mass segregation.”

However, when the Kavli researchers looked closely at binary star systems within NGC 1818, they found a much more complex picture.

Hubble Space Telescope image of the young star cluster NGC 1818 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. KIAA researchers found to their surprise an increasing fraction of binary systems as they looked at increasingly larger distances from the cluster center, as illustrated graphically in the inset – Credit: Peking University

Most stars in clusters actually form in pairs, called “binary stars,” which initially are located so close to one another that they interact, resulting in the destruction of some binary systems. Other binaries, meanwhile, swap partners. Astronomers had expected that the same process that leads a cluster’s most massive stars to gravitate toward the center would also apply to binaries. This is because together, the stars that make up binaries have more mass on average than a single star.

When the astronomers discovered that there were more binaries the farther from the core they observed, they were initially baffled by this unexpected result. They concluded that so-called “soft” binary systems, in which the two stars orbit each other at rather large distances, are destroyed due to close encounters with other stars near the cluster’s center. Meanwhile, “hard” binaries, in which the two stars orbit one another at much shorter distances, survive close encounters with other stars much better, all throughout a cluster. This is why more binaries were seen farther out than close in.

Mapping the radial distribution of binary systems in dense star clusters had never been done before for clusters as young as NGC 1818, which is thought to be 15-30 million years old. This is difficult to do in any case, because there are no young clusters nearby in our own Milky Way galaxy. The new result provides new insights into theoretically predicted processes that govern the evolution of star clusters.

“The extremely dynamic interactions among stars in clusters complicates our understanding of gravity,” team member Chengyuan Li said. “One needs to investigate the entire physical environment to fully understand what’s happening in that environment. Things are usually more complex than they appear.”

Source: The Kavli Foundation [February 20, 2013]

The reasons for going to Mars are powerful.
We must go for the knowledge of Mars. Our robotic probes have revealed that Mars was once a warm and wet planet, suitable for hosting life’s origin. But did it? A search for fossils on the Martian surface or microbes in groundwater below could provide the answer. If found, they would show that the origin of life is not unique to the Earth, and, by implication, reveal a universe that is filled with life and probably intelligence as well. From the point of view learning our true place in the universe, this would be the most important scientific enlightenment since Copernicus.

We must go for the knowledge of Earth. As we begin the twenty-first century, we have evidence that we are changing the Earth’s atmosphere and environment in significant ways. It has become a critical matter for us better to understand all aspects of our environment. In this project, comparative planetology is a very powerful tool, a fact already shown by the role Venusian atmospheric studies played in our discovery of the potential threat of global warming by greenhouse gases. Mars, the planet most like Earth, will have even more to teach us about our home world. The knowledge we gain could be key to our survival.

We must go for the challenge. Civilizations, like people, thrive on challenge and decay without it. The time is past for human societies to use war as a driving stress for technological progress. As the world moves towards unity, we must join together, not in mutual passivity, but in common enterprise, facing outward to embrace a greater and nobler challenge than that which we previously posed to each other. Pioneering Mars will provide such a challenge. Furthermore, a cooperative international exploration of Mars would serve as an example of how the same joint-action could work on Earth in other ventures.

We must go for the youth. The spirit of youth demands adventure. A humans-to-Mars program would challenge young people everywhere to develop their minds to participate in the pioneering of a new world. If a Mars program were to inspire just a single extra percent of today’s youth to scientific educations, the net result would be tens of millions more scientists, engineers, inventors, medical researchers and doctors. These people will make innovations that create new industries, find new medical cures, increase income, and benefit the world in innumerable ways to provide a return that will utterly dwarf the expenditures of the Mars program.

We must go for the opportunity. The settling of the Martian New World is an opportunity for a noble experiment in which humanity has another chance to shed old baggage and begin the world anew; carrying forward as much of the best of our heritage as possible and leaving the worst behind. Such chances do not come often, and are not to be disdained lightly.

We must go for our humanity. Human beings are more than merely another kind of animal, -we are life’s messenger. Alone of the creatures of the Earth, we have the ability to continue the work of creation by bringing life to Mars, and Mars to life. In doing so, we shall make a profound statement as to the precious worth of the human race and every member of it.

We must go for the future. Mars is not just a scientific curiosity; it is a world with a surface area equal to all the continents of Earth combined, possessing all the elements that are needed to support not only life, but technological society. It is a New World, filled with history waiting to be made by a new and youthful branch of human civilization that is waiting to be born. We must go to Mars to make that potential a reality. We must go, not for us, but for a people who are yet to be. We must do it for the Martians.

Believing therefore that the exploration and settlement of Mars is one of the greatest human endeavors possible in our time, we have gathered to found this Mars Society, understanding that even the best ideas for human action are never inevitable, but must be planned, advocated, and achieved by hard work. We call upon all other individuals and organizations of like-minded people to join with us in furthering this great enterprise. No nobler cause has ever been. We shall not rest until it succeeds. Visit The Mars Society, click here

It shows Dr. Robert Zubrin, aerospace engineer and president of The Mars Society, for the visionary and futurist that he is. Mars, as a destination for our planet’s various combined space agencies, is both an amazingly welcoming Earth-like world, as well as a cold, forbidding and distant challenge.

Unlike our Moon, Mars will be the stepping stone to the rest of the universe, and will be the first real and sustainable off-world human colony. A great glimpse of our future as a spacefaring species.

Host Geoff Notkin of the Science Channel’s Meteorite Men series will introduce the Deep Space founders – who include leaders in the space field – and will preview an animated video showing the new spacecraft and the company’s other plans, including a breakthrough process for manufacturing in space.

Deep Space is pursuing an aggressive schedule and plans on prospecting, harvesting and processing asteroids for use in space and to benefit Earth.