1 of 13

Space News Update — May 3, 2016 —

Contents

In the News

Story 1: Found: Clues about Volcanoes Under Ice on Ancient Mars

Story 2: Will SpaceX Get People to Mars Before NASA?

Story 3: Three potentially habitable worlds found around nearby ultracool dwarf star

Departments

The Night Sky

ISS Sighting Opportunities

Space Calendar

NASA-TV Highlights

Food for Thought

Space Image of the Week

2 of 13

1. Found: Clues about Volcanoes Under Ice on Ancient Mars

Volcanoes erupted beneath an ice sheet on Mars billions of years ago, far from any ice sheet on the Red Planet today, new evidence from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests.

The research about these volcanoes helps show there was extensive ice on ancient Mars. It also adds information about an environment combining heat and moisture, which could have provided favorable conditions for microbial life.

Sheridan Ackiss of Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, and collaborators used the orbiter's mineral-mapping spectrometer to investigate surface composition in an oddly textured region of southern Mars called "Sisyphi Montes." The region is studded with flat-topped mountains. Other researchers previously noted these domes' similarity in shape to volcanoes on Earth that erupted underneath ice.

"Rocks tell stories. Studying the rocks can show how the volcano formed or how it was changed over time," Ackiss said. "I wanted to learn what story the rocks on these volcanoes were telling."

When a volcano begins erupting beneath a sheet of ice on Earth, the rapidly generated steam typically leads to explosions that punch through the ice and propel ash high into the sky. For example, the 2010 eruption of ice-covered Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland lofted ash that disrupted air travel across Europe for about a week.

Characteristic minerals resulting from such subglacial volcanism on Earth include zeolites, sulfates and clays. Those are just what the new research has detected at some flat-topped mountains in the Sisyphi Montes region examined with the spacecraft's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), providing resolution of about 60 feet (18 meters) per pixel.

"We wouldn't have been able to do this without the high resolution of CRISM," Ackiss said.

The Sisyphi Montes region extends from about 55 degrees to 75 degrees south latitude. Some of the sites that have shapes and compositions consistent with volcanic eruptions beneath an ice sheet are about 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) from the current south polar ice cap of Mars. The cap now has a diameter of about 220 miles (about 350 kilometers).

Source: JPL Return to Contents

3 of 13

2. Will SpaceX Get People to Mars Before NASA?

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, never one to rest on his laurels, recently laid out the opening move in his long-term quest to land people (himself included) on Mars.

The plan begins with a Dragon capsule, similar to one of the cargo ships now parked at the International Space Station, blasting off for Mars aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket as early as 2018.

The Falcon Heavy, which will have 27 first-stage engines, compared to the nine aboard SpaceX's current Falcon rocket, is scheduled for its first flight before the end of this year. Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful U.S. rocket to fly since NASA's Saturn 5 moon rockets of the 1970s.

NASA, which was an early supporter and primary customer of Musk's Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, was quick to respond to his Mars announcement with a statement of support and the disclosure of an agreement offering technical support.

NASA, after all, has successfully landed spacecraft on Mars seven times.

SpaceX, which has multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to fly cargo and crew to the space station, won't be getting financial support from NASA for its debut Mars mission, known as Red Dragon.

The prospect of SpaceX's self-financed journey to Mars, one which Musk clearly intends to develop to the point of landing people, casts new light on NASA's own Mars program. The project costs NASA about $4 billion per year and does not yet include development of a habitat for deep-space travel or a vehicle to land and then take off again from the surface.

4 of 13

For now, the agency is focused on developing the multipurpose deep-space Orion capsule and a heavy-lift rocket, known as the Space Launch System. The capsule and launcher will be tested together for the first time during an unmanned flight around the moon in November 2018. A follow-up test flight with astronauts aboard is targeted for 2023, setting the stage for a human mission to Mars in the mid-2030s.

Which begs the question: Will SpaceX be there first?

"I hope that Space X and NASA — perhaps in a role more … as advisor instead of NASA as operator — will work together in global harmony to jointly land humans on Mars," astronaut Buzz Aldrin wrote in an email to Discovery News.

Aldrin, one of 12 Americans to walk on the moon, has developed a plan to colonize Mars.

Bob Zubrin, another long-term advocate for Mars settlement, said he thinks its possible SpaceX may land people before NASA and "probable" that U.S. astronauts will ride as passengers to Mars on SpaceX vehicles.

SpaceX intends to use a new landing technology called supersonic retro-propulsion, which has never been demonstrated on Mars.

"I wouldn't bet against SpaceX eventually landing a Dragon on Mars, but it is 300 miles to send the Dragon to the space station. Mars is 150 million miles away and has a thin atmosphere to deal with. (The) degree of difficulty is way, way higher," Scott Hubbard, a consulting professor at Stanford University and former director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

Hubbard, who also served as NASA's first Mars program director, said several critical technologies must be matured before anyone steps foot on Mars, including high-power solar electric propulsion for cargo and resupply ships and a deep-space habitat and life support systems for crews during the rides to and from Mars, which take between six and nine months each way.

"Humans to Mars is such a complex and difficult undertaking that I expect an successful mission to be collaborative — maybe public private partnership, maybe multinational, maybe all of the above," Hubbard said.

More details of Musk's Mars plan are expected to be unveiled at the International Astronautical Congress in September.

Source: Space.com Return to Contents

5 of 13

3. Three potentially habitable worlds found around nearby ultracool dwarf star

A team of astronomers led by Michaël Gillon, of the Institut d'Astrophysique et Géophysique at the University of Liège in Belgium, have used the Belgian TRAPPIST telescope to observe the star 2MASS J23062928-0502285, now also known as TRAPPIST-1. They found that this dim and cool star faded slightly at regular intervals, indicating that several objects were passing between the star and the Earth. Detailed analysis showed that three planets with similar sizes to the Earth were present.

TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star -- it is much cooler and redder than the Sun and barely larger than Jupiter. Such stars are both very common in the Milky Way and very long-lived, but this is the first time that planets have been found around one of them. Despite being so close to the Earth, this star is too dim and too red to be seen with the naked eye or even visually with a large amateur telescope. It lies in the constellation of Aquarius (The Water Carrier).

Emmanuël Jehin, a co-author of the new study, is excited: "This really is a paradigm shift with regards to the planet population and the path towards finding life in the Universe. So far, the existence of such 'red worlds'

6 of 13

orbiting ultra-cool dwarf stars was purely theoretical, butnow we have not just one lonely planet around such a faint red star but a complete system of three planets!"

Michaël Gillon, lead author of the paper presenting the discovery, explains the significance of the new findings: "Why are we trying to detect Earth-like planets around the smallest and coolest stars in the solar neighbourhood? The reason is simple: systems around these tiny stars are the only places where we can detect life on an Earth-sized exoplanet with our current technology. So if we want to find life elsewhere in the Universe, this is where we should start to look."

Astronomers will search for signs of life by studying the effect that the atmosphere of a transiting planet has on the light reaching Earth. For Earth-sized planets orbiting most stars this tiny effect is swamped by the brilliance of the starlight. Only for the case of faint red ultra-cool dwarf stars -- like TRAPPIST-1 -- is this effect big enough to be detected.

Follow-up observations with larger telescopes, including the HAWK-I instrument on ESO's 8-metre Very Large Telescope in Chile, have shown that the planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 have sizes very similar to that of Earth. Two of the planets have orbital periods of about 1.5 days and 2.4 days respectively, and the third planet has a less well determined period in the range 4.5 to 73 days.

"With such short orbital periods, the planets are between 20 and 100 times closer to their star than the Earth to the Sun. The structure of this planetary system is much more similar in scale to the system of Jupiter's moons than to that of the Solar System," explains Michaël Gillon.

Although they orbit very close to their host dwarf star, the inner two planets only receive four times and twice, respectively, the amount of radiation received by the Earth, because their star is much fainter than the Sun. That puts them closer to the star than the habitable zone for this system, although it is still possible that they possess habitable regions on their surfaces. The third, outer, planet's orbit is not yet well known, but it probably receives less radiation than the Earth does, but maybe still enough to lie within the habitable zone.

"Thanks to several giant telescopes currently under construction, including ESO's E-ELT and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope due to launch for 2018, we will soon be able to study the atmospheric composition of these planets and to explore them first for water, then for traces of biological activity. That's a giant step in the search for life in the Universe," concludes Julien de Wit, a co-author from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA.

This work opens up a new direction for exoplanet hunting, as around 15% of the stars near to the Sun are ultra-cool dwarf stars, and it also serves to highlight that the search for exoplanets has now entered the realm of potentially habitable cousins of the Earth. The TRAPPIST survey is a prototype for a more ambitious project called SPECULOOS that will be installed at ESO's Paranal Observatory.

Source: EurekAlert Return to Contents

7 of 13

The Night Sky Tuesday, May 3

• Bright Jupiter stands high due south at dusk. To its right is the Sickle of Leo, upright with Regulus marking the bottom of its handle. The Sickle's second-brightest star is Algieba, Gamma Leonis, a fine double star for telescopes. Before the Moon comes back into the evening sky, explore the faint galaxy groups around Algieba with Sue French's Deep-Sky Wonders article, charts, and photos in the April Sky & Telescope, page 54.

Wednesday, May 4

• The Eta Aquariid meteor shower should peak before local dawn Thursday morning, bit it's active for several mornings before and after as well. This is often the best shower of the year for the Southern Hemisphere. Mid-northern meteor watchers are less well placed and will see fewer. The sky is free of moonlight.

Thursday, May 5

• Summer is more than six weeks away, but the Summer Triangle is making its appearance in the east, one star after another. The first in view is Vega. It's already visible low in the northeast as twilight fades.

Next up is Deneb, lower left of Vega by two or three fists at arm's length. Deneb takes about an hour to appear after Vega does, depending on your latitude.

The third is Altair, which shows up far to their lower right around midnight.

Friday, May 6

• Double shadow transit on Jupiter. Both Callisto and Io cast their tiny black shadows onto Jupiter's sunlit face from 12:38 to 1:42 a.m. EDT tonight (9:38 to 10:42 p.m. PDT).

• New Moon (exact at 3:30 p.m. EDT; 12:30 p.m. PDT).

Source: Sky & Telescope Return to Contents

8 of 13

ISS Sighting Opportunities

For Denver: No sighting for Denver through Friday, May 6. Sighting information for other cities can be found at NASA’s Satellite Sighting Information NASA-TV Highlights (all times Eastern Daylight Time)

4 p.m., 8 p.m., Tuesday, May 3 - Replay of the RNASA Space Awards Gala 2016 (all channels)

1 p.m., 8 p.m., Wednesday, May 4 - Replay of the RNASA Space Awards Gala 2016 (all channels)

11:30 a.m., Thursday, May 5 - ISS Expedition 47 In-Flight Educational Event with the South Suburban College in Chicago and Commander Tim Kopra and Flight Engineer Jeff Williams of NASA (Starts at 11:55 a.m.) (all channels)

2 p.m., Thursday, May 5 - Live Coverage of the Dedication of the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility (all channels)

Watch NASA TV on the Net by going to the NASA website. Return to Contents

9 of 13

Space Calendar • May 03 - Cassini, Orbital Trim Maneuver #448 (OTM-448) • May 03 - Comet 89P/Russell At Opposition (1.719 AU) • May 03 - Apollo Asteroid 444584 (2006 UK) Near-Earth Flyby (0.046 AU) • May 03 - Asteroid 5899 Jedicke Closest Approach To Earth (1.293 AU) • May 03 - Asteroid 5049 Sherlock Closest Approach To Earth (1.474 AU) • May 03 - Asteroid 1578 Kirkwood Closest Approach To Earth (3.654 AU)

• May 04 - [Apr 28] Star Wars Day • May 04 - Comet 237P/LINEAR Closest Approach To Earth (1.395 AU) • May 04 - Comet C/2014 Y1 (PANSTARRS) Closest Approach To Earth (1.646 AU) • May 04 - Comet 140P/Bowell-Skiff Closest Approach To Earth (2.283 AU) • May 04 - Apollo Asteroid 2016 HN Near-Earth Flyby (0.032 AU) • May 04 - Apollo Asteroid 2016 EK56 Near-Earth Flyby (0.083 AU) • May 04 - Kuiper Belt Object 2010 FX86 At Opposition (45.279 AU) • May 05 - [May 03] JCSat 14 Falcon 9 Launch • May 05 - Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower Peak • May 05 - Apollo Asteroid 388945 (2008 TZ3) Near-Earth Flyby (0.034 AU) • May 05 - [May 03] Amor Asteroid 2016 HE19 Near-Earth Flyby (0.068 AU) • May 05 - Asteroid 3688 Navajo Closest Approach To Earth (1.359 AU) • May 05 - Asteroid 8003 Kelvin Closest Approach To Earth (1.405 AU) • May 05 - Centaur Object 144908 (2004 YH32) At Opposition (11.747 AU) • May 05 - 55th Anniversary (1961), Freedom 7 Launch (Alan Shepard, 1st US Man in Space) • May 05 - John Draper's 205th Birthday (1811)

• May 06 - [Apr 29] Cassini, Titan Flyby

• May 06 - [Apr 29] Space Day • May 06 - Comet C/2015 B2 (PANSTARRS) Perihelion (3.370 AU) • May 06 - Comet 121P/Shoemaker-Holt At Opposition (3.890 AU) • May 06 - Atira Asteroid 434326 (2004 JG6) Closest Approach To Earth (0.825 AU) • May 06 - Robert Dicke's 100th Birthday (1916) • May 06 - 120th Anniversary (1896), 1st Successful Flight of a Large Unmanned Heavier-Than-Air Craft

(Langley Aerodrome No. 5)

Source: JPL Space Calendar Return to Contents

10 of 13

Food for Thought

Are we alone? Setting some limits to our uniqueness

Are humans unique and alone in the vast universe? This question—summed up in the famous Drake equation—has for a half-century been one of the most intractable and uncertain in science. But a new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets combined with a broader approach to the question makes it possible to assign a new empirically valid probability to whether any other advanced technological civilizations have ever existed.

And it shows that unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet are astonishingly low, then human kind is not the universe's first technological, or advanced, civilization.

The paper, published in Astrobiology, also shows for the first time just what "pessimism" or "optimism" mean when it comes to estimating the likelihood of advanced extraterrestrial life.

"The question of whether advanced civilizations exist elsewhere in the universe has always been vexed with three large uncertainties in the Drake equation," said Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and co-author of the paper. "We've known for a long time approximately how many stars exist. We didn't know how many of those stars had planets that could potentially harbor life, how often life might evolve and lead to intelligent beings, and how long any civilizations might last before becoming extinct."

"Thanks to NASA's Kepler satellite and other searches, we now know that roughly one-fifth of stars have planets in "habitable zones," where temperatures could support life as we know it. So one of the three big uncertainties has now been constrained."

11 of 13

Frank said that the third big question—how long civilizations might survive—is still completely unknown. "The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly ten thousand years doesn't really tell us if other societies would last that long or perhaps much longer," he explained.

But Frank and his coauthor, Woodruff Sullivan of the astronomy department and astrobiology program at the University of Washington, found they could eliminate that term altogether by simply expanding the question.

"Rather than asking how many civilizations may exist now, we ask 'Are we the only technological species that has ever arisen?" said Sullivan. "This shifted focus eliminates the uncertainty of the civilization lifetime question and allows us to address what we call the 'cosmic archaeological question'—how often in the history of the universe has life evolved to an advanced state?"

That still leaves huge uncertainties in calculating the probability for advanced life to evolve on habitable planets. It's here that Frank and Sullivan flip the question around. Rather than guessing at the odds of advanced life developing, they calculate the odds against it occurring in order for humanity to be the only advanced civilization in the entire history of the observable universe. With that, Frank and Sullivan then calculated the line between a Universe where humanity has been the sole experiment in civilization and one where others have come before us.

"Of course, we have no idea how likely it is that an intelligent technological species will evolve on a given habitable planet," says Frank. But using our method we can tell exactly how low that probability would have to be for us to be the ONLY civilization the Universe has produced. We call that the pessimism line. If the actual probability is greater than the pessimism line, then a technological species and civilization has likely happened before."

Using this approach, Frank and Sullivan calculate how unlikely advanced life must be if there has never been another example among the universe's ten billion trillion stars, or even among our own Milky Way galaxy's hundred billion.

The result? By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe's 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.

"One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small," says Frank. "To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you'd be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history!"

For smaller volumes the numbers are less extreme. For example, another technological species likely has evolved on a habitable planet in our own Milky Way galaxy if the odds against it evolving on any one habitable planet are better than one chance in 60 billion.

But if those numbers seem to give ammunition to the "optimists" about the existence of alien civilizations, Sullivan points out that the full Drake equation—which calculates the odds that other civilizations are around today—may give solace to the pessimists.

In 1961, astrophysicist Frank Drake developed an equation to estimate the number of advanced civilizations likely to exist in the Milky Way galaxy. The Drake equation (top row) has proven to be a durable framework for research, and space technology has advanced scientists' knowledge of several variables. But it is impossible to do anything more than guess at variables such as L, the probably longevity of other advanced civilizations.

12 of 13

In new research, Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan offer a new equation (bottom row) to address a slightly different question: What is the number of advanced civilizations likely to have developed over the history of the observable universe? Frank and Sullivan's equation draws on Drake's, but eliminates the need for L.

Their argument hinges upon the recent discovery of how many planets exist and how many of those lie in what scientists call the "habitable zone" – planets in which liquid water, and therefore life, could exist. This allows Frank and Sullivan to define a number they call Nast.Nast is the product of N*, the total number of stars; fp, the fraction of those stars that form planets; and np, the average number of those planets in the habitable zones of their stars.

They then set out what they call the "Archaelogical-form" of the Drake equation, which defines A as the "number of technological species that have ever formed over the history of the observable Universe."

Their equation, A=Nast*fbt, describes A as the product of Nast – the number of habitable planets in a given volume of the Universe – multiplied by fbt – the likelihood of a technological species arising on one of these planets. The volume considered could be, for example, the entire Universe, or just our Galaxy. "The universe is more than 13 billion years old," said Sullivan. "That means that even if there have been a thousand civilizations in our own galaxy, if they live only as long as we have been around—roughly ten thousand years—then all of them are likely already extinct. And others won't evolve until we are long gone. For us to have much chance of success in finding another "contemporary" active technological civilization, on average they must last much longer than our present lifetime."

"Given the vast distances between stars and the fixed speed of light we might never really be able to have a conversation with another civilization anyway," said Frank. "If they were 20,000 light years away then every exchange would take 40,000 years to go back and forth."

But, as Frank and Sullivan point out, even if there aren't other civilizations in our galaxy to communicate with now, the new result still has a profound scientific and philosophical importance. "From a fundamental perspective the question is 'has it ever happened anywhere before?'" said Frank. Our result is the first time anyone has been able to set any empirical answer for that question and it is astonishingly likely that we are not the only time and place that an advance civilization has evolved."

According to Frank and Sullivan their result has a practical application as well. As humanity faces its crisis in sustainability and climate change we can wonder if other civilization-building species on other planets have gone through a similar bottleneck and made it to the other side. As Frank puts it "We don't even know if it's possible to have a high-tech civilization that lasts more than a few centuries." With Frank and Sullivan's new result, scientists can begin using everything they know about planets and climate to begin modeling the interactions of an energy-intensive species with their home world knowing that a large sample of such cases has already existed in the cosmos. "Our results imply that our evolution has not been unique and has probably happened many times before. The other cases are likely to include many energy intensive civilizations dealing with their feedbacks onto their planets as their civilizations grow. That means we can begin exploring the problem using simulations to get a sense of what leads to long lived civilizations and what doesn't."

Source: Phys.org Return to Contents

13 of 13

Space Image of the Week

NASA’s SDO Watches Glowing Solar Material Arch Up and Out

An elongated, streaming arch of solar material rose up at the sun’s edge before breaking apart in this animation of imagery captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on April 28, 2016. While some of the solar material fell back into the sun, the disintegration of this magnetic arch also sent some particles streaming into space. These details were captured in a type of light that’s invisible to human eyes, called extreme ultraviolet. The images were colorized in gold for easy viewing.

Click here to view a video captured by SDO.

Source: NASA Return to Contents