The survey, also known as Tess, is NASA’s next step in the search for exoplanets, including those that could support life.

Once in orbit, Tess will spend about two years surveying 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun to search for planets outside our solar system.

Tess will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbour life.

With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth, NASA said in an earlier statement.

Sixty days after the launch and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission. Four wide-field cameras will give Tess a field-of-view that covers 85 per cent of our entire sky.

Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that Tess will observe one by one.

The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away.

IANS

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The latest NASA astrophysics endeavor is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,500 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years, revolutionizing one of the newest fields in space science.

NASA expects TESS to detect thousands more previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or “super-Earth”-sized — no larger than twice as big as our home planet.

Such worlds are believed to stand the greatest chance of having rocky surfaces or oceans, and are thus considered the most promising candidates for the evolution of life, as opposed to gas giants similar to Jupiter or Neptune.

Astronomers said they hope to end up with about 100 more rocky exoplanets for further study.

The new probe will take about 60 days to attain its highly elliptical, first-of-a-kind orbit that will loop TESS between Earth and the moon every two and a half weeks.

Kepler’s positioning system broke down in 2013 about four years after its launch, and though scientists found a way to keep it operational it has nearly run out of fuel.

“So it’s perfect timing that we’ll be launching TESS to continue the great activity of looking for planets around stars other than our sun and thinking about what it might mean for life in the universe,” Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics, told reporters at a news briefing in Washington on Wednesday.

TESS, roughly the size of a refrigerator with solar-panel wings, is equipped with four special cameras to survey 200,000 stars that are relatively near the sun and thus among the brightest in the sky, seeking out those with planets of their own.

Like Kepler, TESS will use a detection method called transit photometry, which looks for periodic, repetitive dips in the visible light from stars caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of them.

But unlike Kepler, which fixed its glare on stars within a tiny fraction of the sky, TESS will scan the majority of the heavens for shorter periods and focus much of its attention on stars called red dwarfs, which are smaller, cooler and longer-lived than our sun.

One reason is red dwarfs have a high propensity for Earth-sized, presumably rocky planets, making them potentially fertile ground for closer examination, said David Latham, TESS science director for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Also because red dwarfs are so small, and their planets orbit more closely than the Earth does to the sun, the dip in light from a planetary transit of a red dwarf is more pronounced compared with a larger star, Latham said.

“It’s easier to find interesting planets around smaller stars,” he said.

Measuring dips in starlight can determine the exoplanet’s size and orbital path. Further observations from ground telescopes can supply its mass and ultimately the planet’s density and composition — whether largely solid, liquid or gas.

Martin Still, the TESS program scientist for NASA, said more than 50 rocky, Earth- or super-Earth-sized planets have previously been identified, and NASA expects to increase that number through the new mission.

The most favorable discoveries will undergo closer scrutiny by a new generation of larger, more powerful telescopes now under development that will search for telltale signs of water and “the kinds of gases in their atmospheres that on Earth are an indication of life,” Hertz said.

“TESS itself will not be able to find life beyond Earth, but TESS will help us figure out where to point our larger telescopes,” he said.

Reuters

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In this Low-Boom Flight Demonstration contract, Lockheed Martin is obliged to completing the design and fabrication of an experimental aircraft, known as an X-plane.

The plane is expected to cruise at an elevation of more than 16,700 meters, at a speed of more than 1,500 km per hour, but create a sound about as loud as a car door closing instead of a sonic boom, according to NASA.

Once NASA accepts the aircraft from its contractor in late 2021, the agency will perform additional flight tests to prove the quiet supersonic technology works as designed, aircraft performance is robust, and it’s safe to operate in the country.

According to its plan, beginning in mid-2022, NASA will fly the X-plane over select US cities and collect data about community responses to the flights.

The agency said this data set will be provided to US and international regulators for their use in considering new sound-based rules regarding supersonic flight over land, which could enable new commercial cargo and passenger markets in faster-than-sound air travel.

The X-plane’s configuration will be based on a preliminary design developed by Lockheed Martin under a contract awarded in 2016. The proposed aircraft will be 28.65 metres long with a wingspan of nearly 9 metres, which have a fully-fuelled takeoff weight of about 14,650 kg.

The jet will be propelled by a single General Electric F414 engine, the powerplant used by F/A-18E/F fighters, according to NASA.

“This is probably going to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. We’re all pretty excited,” said Jim Less, a primary NASA pilots who will fly the X-plane after Lockheed Martin’s pilots have completed initial test flights.

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The successful launch of Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment or ASPIRE atop a sounding rocket on Saturday came after several days of delays due to rough seas at the parachute’s recovery zone in the Atlantic Ocean.

The 18-meter-long Terrier-Black Brant IX rocket carried ASPIRE to a maximum altitude of 51 kilometres.

The parachute unfurled shortly thereafter, while ASPIRE was travelling significantly faster than the speed of sound.

ASPIRE went so high up because the Martian atmosphere is just one per cent as dense as that of Earth.

The payload was a bullet-nosed, cylindrical structure holding a supersonic parachute, the parachute’s deployment mechanism, and the test’s high-definition instrumentation, including cameras, to record data.

The payload splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean 40 miles from Wallops Island and will be recovered and returned to Wallops for data retrieval and inspection.

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The Iridium-5 NEXT Mission marked the fifth set of 10 satellites that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched for its customer’s Iridium NEXT global satellite constellation.

The contract calls for SpaceX to launch a total of 75 satellites for Iridium.

The launch took place on schedule at 7:13 am.

“Successful deployment of all 10 @IridiumComm NEXT satellites to low-Earth orbit confirmed,” Musk’s company said on Twitter.

SpaceX’s next launch is scheduled for April 2, when another Falcon 9 rocket will be used in a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station.

That rocket is scheduled to lift off Monday afternoon from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

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“We were surprised to see an exoplanet with the same high density, showing that Mercury-like planets are perhaps not as rare as we thought,” Armstrong said.

Named K2-229b, the planet is 20 per cent larger than Earth but has a mass 2.6 times greater—and a dayside temperature of over 2000 degrees Celsius.

Situated at about 340 million light years away from Earth, it finds itself very close to its host star (around a hundredth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), which itself is a medium-sized active K dwarf in the Virgo Constellation.

K2-229b orbits this star every fourteen hours, according to the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“Interestingly K2-229b is also the innermost planet in a system of at least three planets, though all three orbit much closer to their star than Mercury. More discoveries like this will help us shed light on the formation of these unusual planets, as well as Mercury itself,” Armstrong added.

Using the K2 telescope, Armstrong and colleagues employed the Doppler spectroscopy technique—also known as the ‘wobble method’ to discover and characterise this faraway planet.

The dense, metallic nature of K2-229b has numerous potential origins, and one hypothesis is that its atmosphere might have been eroded by intense stellar wind and flares, as the planet is so close to its star.

Another possibility is that K2-229b was formed after a huge impact between two giant astronomical bodies in space billions of years ago—much like the theory that the Moon was formed after Earth collided with a body the size of Mars, according to the study.

Discovering details about far-flung planets across the universe gives us more clues as to how planets in our own solar system formed.

As K2-229b is similar to Mercury, the researcher believe that knowing more about the former can potentially reveal more about the latter.

IANS

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Ongoing changes with the cryosphere, while often occurring in remote regions, have impacts on people all around the world—sea level rise affects coastlines globally, more than a billion people rely on water from snowpack, and the diminishing sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean plays a significant role in Earth’s climate and weather patterns.

This spring, NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences are scheduled to launch the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission, twin satellites that will continue the original GRACE mission’s legacy of tracking fluctuations in Earth’s gravity field in order to detect changes in mass, including the mass of ice sheets and aquifers.

And in autumn, NASA is scheduled to launch the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), which will use a highly advanced laser instrument to measure the changing elevation of ice around the world, providing a view of the height of Earth’s ice with greater detail than previously possible.

Together the two missions will make critical, complementary measurements of Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets, NASA said.

Both missions will also make other key observations. For instance, GRACE-FO will measure groundwater reserves and deep ocean currents and ICESat-2 will measure sea ice thickness and vegetation height.

NASA research shows that permafrost—permanently frozen ground in the Arctic that contains heat-trapping gases such as methane and carbon dioxide—is thawing at faster rates now than scientists have observed before.

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“Red dwarf systems, especially coolest red dwarfs, are just beginning to be investigated, so they are very exciting targets for future exoplanet research,” Hirano said.

One of the brightest red dwarfs—K2-155 that is around 200 light years away from Earth—has three transiting “super-Earths”, which are slightly bigger than our own planet.

Of those three “super-Earths”, the outermost planet, K2-155d, with a radius 1.6 times that of Earth, could be within the host star’s habitable zone, the researchers noted in the study appeared in The Astronomical Journal.

The team found that K2-155d could potentially have liquid water on its surface based on three-dimensional global climate simulations.

To reach this conclusion, the team sifted through data from NASA Kepler spacecraft’s second mission, K2, and follow-up observations using ground-based telescopes, including the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) in Spain.

A more precise estimate of the radius and temperature of the K2-155 star would be needed to conclude definitively whether K2-155d is habitable.

Achieving such precision would require further studies, for example, using interferometric techniques, the researchers said.

The researchers also investigated the relationship between planet radius and metallicity of the host star.

“Large planets are only discovered around metal-rich stars and what we found was consistent with our predictions. The few planets with a radius about three times that of Earth were found orbiting the most metal-rich red dwarfs,” Hirano noted.

With the planned launch of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in April this year, Hirano is hopeful that even more planets will be discovered.

“TESS is expected to find many candidate planets around bright stars closer to Earth,” he said.

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The galaxy NGC 1277, lies near the centre of the Perseus cluster of over 1,000 galaxies, located 240 million light-years away.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, showed that the relic galaxy has twice as many stars as our Milky Way, but physically it is as small as one quarter the size of our galaxy.

Essentially, NGC 1277 is in a state of “arrested development”.

Further, the scientists found that NGC 1277 does not have the same kinds of globular clusters that other large galaxies have.

While massive galaxies tend to have both metal-poor (appearing blue) and metal-rich (appearing red) globular clusters, NGC 1277 is almost entirely lacking in blue globular clusters.

This suggests that NGC 1277 never grew further by gobbling up surrounding galaxies.

“I’ve been studying globular clusters in galaxies for a long time, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen this,” said Michael Beasley, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias at the University of La Laguna, Spain.

NGC 1277 started its life with a bang long ago, ferociously churning out stars 1,000 times faster than seen in our own Milky Way today.

But it abruptly went quiescent as the baby boomer stars aged and grew ever redder.

The very rare and odd assemblage of stars has remained essentially unchanged for the past 10 billion years, scientists said.

In addition, NGC 1277 also has a central black hole that is much more massive than it should be for a galaxy of that size.

This reinforces the scenario that the supermassive black hole and dense hub of the galaxy grew simultaneously, but the galaxy’s stellar population stopped growing and expanding because it was starved of outside material, the study showed.

While Hubble has spotted relic galaxies before, but this one is by far the closest.

“We can explore such original galaxies in full detail and probe the conditions of the early universe,” said Ignacio Trujillo, from the varsity.

For the study, the team started looking for “arrested development” galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and found 50 candidate massive compact galaxies.

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“The GLOBE Programme is offering this challenge to show people how important it is to NASA to have citizen scientist observations, observations from the ground up,” Marile Colon Robles, from NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Virginia, US, said in a statement.

“We’re going from winter to spring, so the types of storms will change, which will also change the types of cloud,” Robles said.

The challenge participants with the most observations will be congratulated by a NASA scientist in a video posted on the GLOBE Programme’s website and on social media.

Cloud data collected by citizen scientists are highly valued and used by researchers because it helps to validate data from Earth-observing instruments.

“Looking at what an observer recorded as clouds and looking at their surface observations really helps us better understand the images that were matched from the satellite,” Robles said.

One does not need to be a cloud-gazing pro to participate. For those who want to be part of the challenge but don’t have a lot of experience identifying clouds, Robles offers the following advice: “Just go outside”.

The more clouds you observe, she said, the more comfortable you’ll be collecting data.

IANS

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