Latest news with #planetaryscience
Gizmodo
3 hours ago
- Science
- Gizmodo
Something Big Is Twisting Mercury's Crust
Mercury has it rough. Not only is it the smallest planet in the solar system, it's also the closest to our Sun. This unfortunate position has caused Mercury to develop cracks and fractures across its surface, and generate stresses to its crust, a new study has found. Mercury is dry, rugged, and heavily cratered; the planet appears deformed with towering cliffs and ridges, as well as fracture lines that run along its surface. The origin of Mercury's scars has long been a mystery: How did the planet cool and contract in such an unusual way billions of years ago after it formed? Turns out, the answer may be due to its uncomfortable proximity to the Sun. A team of researchers from the University of Bern created physical models of Mercury to see how much of the Sun's tidal forces affect the small planet, revealing that the star may have influenced the development and orientation of tectonic features on its surface over long periods of time. The results are detailed in a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Planets form from the hot, molten material left over from the birth of a star. Over time, these objects cool and their internal materials shrink, causing them to contract as their crusts wrinkle and crack. Evidence has shown that Mercury, on the other hand, not only shrank—its surface also shifted laterally. Cracks and fractures also formed in its rocky crust. Scientists assumed that the process that shaped Mercury's outer layer was a result of this cooling and contracting, but the study suggests it may be the planet's cozy orbit around the Sun. Mercury has one of the most unique orbits in the solar system. It takes about 88 Earth days to complete one orbit around the Sun, during which the planet rotates around its axis three times every two orbits. Its orbit is also highly elliptical and is tilted by around 7 degrees compared to Earth's orbital plane, its eccentricity means that the tidal forces Mercury experiences from the Sun vary a lot. 'These orbital characteristics create tidal stresses that may leave a mark on the planet's surface,' Liliane Burkhard, a researcher at the Space Research and Planetary Sciences Division at the Institute of Physics at the University of Bern, and lead author of the study, said in a statement. 'We can see tectonic patterns on Mercury that suggest more is going on than just global cooling and contraction.' The team behind the study sought to investigate how these tidal forces contribute to shaping Mercury's crust. They used physical models of Mercury over the past 4 billion years to calculate how the Sun's tidal forces may have influenced its surface tensions. The results showed that the the changing gravitational pull of the Sun has impacted Mercury's tectonic features over time. 'Tidal stresses have been largely overlooked until now, as they were considered to be too small to play a significant role,' Burkhard said. 'Our results show that while the magnitude of these stresses is not sufficient to generate faulting alone, the direction of the tidally induced shear stresses are consistent with the observed orientations of fault-slip patterns on Mercury's surface.' The recent findings can also be applied to other planets, illustrating how subtle forces aside from tectonics can make a lasting impact on its surface. 'Understanding how a planet like Mercury deforms helps us understand how planetary bodies evolve over billions of years,' according to Burkhard. The scientists behind the new study are hoping to gather more clues about Mercury's deformed surface through the BepiColombo mission, which launched in October 2018 as a joint venture between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). BepiColombo is only the third spacecraft to visit Mercury; the elusive planet is hard to reach due to the Sun's powerful gravitational pull that may have maimed the planet's surface.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Part of Mars is now named after this UNM researcher. Here's why.
Jun. 14—In his high school yearbook, Horton Newsom wrote down his plan for the future: "College and then Mars." Now, a 100-meter-wide landmark on the Red Planet bears his name. For decades, Newsom devoted his life to research in outer space, primarily at the University of New Mexico, where he worked as a planetary scientist for nearly 40 years and even helped operate a rover that explored Mars. On his way to visit his adult children in California in April 2024, Newsom suffered a medical episode as he was driving, causing him to lose control, speed into an intersection and cause a crash that killed him. More than a year later, a geographic feature on Mars was named the "Horton Newsom Point" for his decades of work devoted to researching the solar system. "He would be so happy, he would feel so honored," said his wife, Joan Newsom. "It's a pretty important feature, and the Mars Curiosity rover, which he was a project scientist on, it'll eventually go by that feature." The feature that bears his name is known as a yardang, a ridge created by wind erosion. This one sits near the summit of a mountain in the center of Gale Crater on Mars. For Joan Newsom, the honor comes after many months of coping with the tragic crash. "I nearly died myself in the car accident. So it's been a year of literally getting back on my feet," she said. "He was my best friend and soulmate, so not having him around, like, I'm so thankful that I'm alive, but I just miss having him around." Zach Gallegos, a planetary scientist at UNM, also misses him, saying that they had worked together in some capacity since meeting in 2006 when Gallegos was an undergraduate student. "We'd sort of gone past the realm of normal student- adviser relationship. He and I were basically research collaborators," Gallegos said. "I would be in his office sometimes four or five hours a day, where we were just looking at cool stuff that the rover was doing and making actual scientific discoveries." While he thinks it's a "really nice thing" that a portion of the planet they studied together is named after his mentor and colleague, Gallegos is looking to other parts of outer space to pay homage to Horton Newsom. "I'm actually right now looking at this crater on the moon... and I am working on getting the crater named after Horton," Gallegos said. "He wasn't just a Mars scientist. ... Horton, early on in his career, was looking at the interior of planets and the moon, so high-pressure experiments involving the core and mantle boundaries for other planets, and so I think that it's just fitting that he should also have a crater named after him on the moon." Horton Newsom's time in academia began near his hometown of Oakland, California, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974, where he studied geology, earning a bachelor's degree. He went on to earn a master's and Ph.D. in geosciences from the University of Arizona, then continued his journey east of his home state, landing a job at UNM in 1986. In addition to his research on campus, Horton Newsom helped operate NASA's rover named Curiosity, which is traveling across Mars. According to his longtime colleague at UNM's planetary science department, Laura Crossey, "he knew every single thing that that rover drove over." "That's one of the things about Horton. He was enamored and fascinated by the Red Planet, probably since his youth," Crossey said. "It was super exciting and really a great honor that one of the most amazing features that's viewed — it's been a target for a long, long time — and to name that after Horton was really a marvelous thing that the international planetary community could do."
CBC
03-06-2025
- Health
- CBC
What does space smell like? This perfume-making astrobiologist is trying to find out
After a long career of creating designer perfumes, Marina Barcenilla decided to turn her nose to the cosmos. The fragrance designer enrolled in university in 2015 to study planetary science. She was taking classes in astrochemistry — the chemical makeup of outer space — when she realized she could marry her two passions. "Whenever I see something new, the first question is: I wonder what that smells like," she told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "One day I thought: Actually, this molecule that I'm studying? I have it in my perfume lab. And this smell that I am imagining? I could actually create it." Barcenilla is now an astrobiology doctoral researcher at the University of Westminster in London, England. When she's not exploring the feasibility of life on Mars, she's recreating the smells of space, from the sulfuric stench of Jupiter's deepest clouds, to the pungent alcohol-like punch at the centre of the Milky Way. Four of those stellar scents are now available for public sniffing at the London Natural History Museum, as part of the ongoing exhibit: Space: Could life exist beyond Earth? 'Antiseptic,' but also like gunpowder? So what does space smell like? "I don't think it smells very good in general," said Barcenilla. Those in the know can attest. Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, upon returning from the International Space Station, told CBC News in 2009 that space smells "cold" and "antiseptic." "I opened the hatch six hours after the space walk. This entire airlock area had been exposed to the vacuum of space for all those hours. So when I opened the door, I smelled what was kind of an antiseptic smell," she said. "It was not detergent but it was definitely like a hospital-smell type and I thought, 'Wow, that's the smell of space.' The more I thought about it, I thought: 'Wow, this is what nothing smells like, because there's probably nothing left in there, not a single microbe or anything.'" Canadian astronaut Chris Hatfield, meanwhile, described it differently, noting in 2013 that he and many others aboard the station reported a "burnt steak and gunpowder" smell in the airlock. "Not exactly a spring garden," he said in a Canadian Space Agency video. Barcenilla says that when it comes to the smells of space, it really depends on what, specifically, you mean. "Most of space is quite empty and … it isn't really going to smell," she said. "But it's when you get to specific planets or moons, or when you go to a molecular cloud where we find high concentrations of different gases and microscopic dust, that we can then find molecules and chemical compounds that have a smell." Barcenilla says she's created 25 smells since she began doing this work in 2017. For the museum exhibit, she whipped up the scent of Mars, which is her scientific specialty; Titan, a large moon orbiting the planet Saturn; Bennu, an asteroid; and Earth as it was some 3.5-4 billion years ago, when life was just beginning. "The early Earth is a bit smelly. It's a combination of a little bit of kind of earthy wet smell, like what you get when it rains, but also with the smell that you get from various microbial strains," she said. "One of the smells that you get is a kind of sulphury cabbagey smell that goes in there as well. So that's a bit stinky." She admits that none of her creations can be fact-checked, per se. "In space, you can't smell so it's always going to be impossible. We don't have air that we can breathe, so that's completely out of the question," she said. "But what I'm trying to do is recreate the chemistry that we find in various places in space." 'The more it stinks, the more people like to smell it' Barcenilla has brought her space smells to schools to teach children, and she's also had a chance to watch people interact with them at the museum. "I always thought people are going to be a bit scared about the smelly stuff, but no, those are the best ones," she said. "The more it stinks, the more people like to smell it and the more they laugh and the more questions they ask about it." Triggering that curiosity, she says, is the whole point. "It's about bringing space closer to Earth, and it's for people to open their minds and understand that everything that we have out there in space has also ended up here on Earth," she said. As foreign as the final frontier may seem, Barcenilla says there's nothing out there that's truly unfamiliar, at least from an olfactory perspective. Jupiter's inner clouds? Barcenilla tells BBC News they're full of ammonia and sulphur, something you might find in fertilizer, and which smells like rotten eggs. The very centre of our galaxy? There you'll find Ethyl formate, a compound commonly found in fruit, and which probably smells, at best, like rum, and at worst, like nail polish remover.
Reuters
19-05-2025
- Science
- Reuters
Study casts doubt on water flows as cause of streaks on Martian slopes
WASHINGTON, May 19 (Reuters) - Images taken of Mars from orbit dating back as far as the 1970s have captured curious dark streaks running down the sides of cliffs and crater walls that some scientists have construed as possible evidence of flows of liquid water, suggesting that the planet harbors environments suitable for living organisms. A new study casts doubt on that interpretation. Examining about 500,000 of these sinewy features spotted in satellite images, the researchers concluded they were created probably through dry processes that left the superficial appearance of liquid flows, underscoring the view of Mars as a desert planet currently inhospitable to life - at least on its surface. The data indicated that formation of these streaks is driven by the accumulation of fine-grain dust from the Martian atmosphere on sloped terrain that is then knocked down the slopes by triggers such as wind gusts, meteorite impacts and marsquakes. "The tiny dust particles can create flow-like patterns without liquid. This phenomenon occurs because extremely fine dust can behave similarly to a liquid when disturbed - flowing, branching and creating finger-like patterns as it moves downslope," said Adomas Valantinas, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary sciences at Brown University and co-leader of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Communications, opens new tab. "It's similar to how dry sand can flow like water when poured. But on Mars, the ultra-fine particles and low gravity enhance these fluid-like properties, creating features that might be mistaken for water flows when they're actually just dry material in motion," Valantinas added. The study examined about 87,000 satellite images - including those obtained between 2006 and 2020 by a camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - of slope streaks, which form suddenly and fade over a period of years. They average roughly 1,970-2,540 feet (600-775 meters) long, sometimes branching out and going around obstacles. The slope streaks were concentrated mostly in the northern hemisphere, particularly in three major clusters: at the plains of Elysium Planitia, the highlands of Arabia Terra and the vast Tharsis volcanic plateau including the Olympus Mons volcano, towering about three times higher than Mount Everest. The researchers said limitations in the resolution of the satellite images mean they account for only a fraction of slope streaks. They estimated the actual number at up to two million. Water is considered an essential ingredient for life. Mars billions of years ago was wetter and warmer than it is today. The question remains whether Mars has any liquid water on its surface when temperatures seasonally can edge above the freezing point. It remains possible that small amounts of water - perhaps sourced from buried ice, subsurface aquifers or abnormally humid air - could mix with enough salt in the ground to create a flow even on the frigid Martian surface. That raises the possibility that the slope streaks, if caused by wet conditions, could be habitable niches. "Generally, it is very difficult for liquid water to exist on the Martian surface, due to the low temperature and the low atmospheric pressure. But brines - very salty water - might potentially be able to exist for short periods of time," said planetary geomorphologist and study co-leader Valentin Bickel of the University of Bern in Switzerland. Given the massive volume of images, the researchers employed an advanced machine-learning method, looking for correlations involving temperature patterns, atmospheric dust deposition, meteorite impacts, the nature of the terrain and other factors. The geostatistical analysis found that slope streaks often appear in the dustiest regions and correlate with wind patterns, while some form near the sites of fresh impacts and quakes. The researchers also studied shorter-lived features called recurring slope lineae, or RSL, seen primarily in the Martian southern highlands. These grow in the summer and fade the following winter. The data suggested that these also were associated with dry processes such as dust devils - whirlwinds of dust - and rockfalls. The analysis found that both types of features were not typically associated with factors indicative of a liquid or frost origin such as high surface temperature fluctuations, high humidity or specific slope orientations. "It all comes back to habitability and the search for life," Bickel said. "If slope streaks and RSL would really be driven by liquid water or brines, they could create a niche for life. However, if they are not tied to wet processes, this allows us to focus our attention on other, more promising locations."
CNA
19-05-2025
- Science
- CNA
Study casts doubt on water flows as cause of streaks on Martian slopes
WASHINGTON :Images taken of Mars from orbit dating back as far as the 1970s have captured curious dark streaks running down the sides of cliffs and crater walls that some scientists have construed as possible evidence of flows of liquid water, suggesting that the planet harbors environments suitable for living organisms. A new study casts doubt on that interpretation. Examining about 500,000 of these sinewy features spotted in satellite images, the researchers concluded they were created probably through dry processes that left the superficial appearance of liquid flows, underscoring the view of Mars as a desert planet currently inhospitable to life - at least on its surface. The data indicated that formation of these streaks is driven by the accumulation of fine-grain dust from the Martian atmosphere on sloped terrain that is then knocked down the slopes by triggers such as wind gusts, meteorite impacts and marsquakes. "The tiny dust particles can create flow-like patterns without liquid. This phenomenon occurs because extremely fine dust can behave similarly to a liquid when disturbed - flowing, branching and creating finger-like patterns as it moves downslope," said Adomas Valantinas, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary sciences at Brown University and co-leader of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Communications. "It's similar to how dry sand can flow like water when poured. But on Mars, the ultra-fine particles and low gravity enhance these fluid-like properties, creating features that might be mistaken for water flows when they're actually just dry material in motion," Valantinas added. The study examined about 87,000 satellite images - including those obtained between 2006 and 2020 by a camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - of slope streaks, which form suddenly and fade over a period of years. They average roughly 1,970-2,540 feet (600-775 meters) long, sometimes branching out and going around obstacles. The slope streaks were concentrated mostly in the northern hemisphere, particularly in three major clusters: at the plains of Elysium Planitia, the highlands of Arabia Terra and the vast Tharsis volcanic plateau including the Olympus Mons volcano, towering about three times higher than Mount Everest. The researchers said limitations in the resolution of the satellite images mean they account for only a fraction of slope streaks. They estimated the actual number at up to two million. Water is considered an essential ingredient for life. Mars billions of years ago was wetter and warmer than it is today. The question remains whether Mars has any liquid water on its surface when temperatures seasonally can edge above the freezing point. It remains possible that small amounts of water - perhaps sourced from buried ice, subsurface aquifers or abnormally humid air - could mix with enough salt in the ground to create a flow even on the frigid Martian surface. That raises the possibility that the slope streaks, if caused by wet conditions, could be habitable niches. "Generally, it is very difficult for liquid water to exist on the Martian surface, due to the low temperature and the low atmospheric pressure. But brines - very salty water - might potentially be able to exist for short periods of time," said planetary geomorphologist and study co-leader Valentin Bickel of the University of Bern in Switzerland. Given the massive volume of images, the researchers employed an advanced machine-learning method, looking for correlations involving temperature patterns, atmospheric dust deposition, meteorite impacts, the nature of the terrain and other factors. The geostatistical analysis found that slope streaks often appear in the dustiest regions and correlate with wind patterns, while some form near the sites of fresh impacts and quakes. The researchers also studied shorter-lived features called recurring slope lineae, or RSL, seen primarily in the Martian southern highlands. These grow in the summer and fade the following winter. The data suggested that these also were associated with dry processes such as dust devils - whirlwinds of dust - and rockfalls. The analysis found that both types of features were not typically associated with factors indicative of a liquid or frost origin such as high surface temperature fluctuations, high humidity or specific slope orientations. "It all comes back to habitability and the search for life," Bickel said. "If slope streaks and RSL would really be driven by liquid water or brines, they could create a niche for life. However, if they are not tied to wet processes, this allows us to focus our attention on other, more promising locations."
