Science

Antechinus males only live for one breeding season, so they give up 3 hours of sleep a night during this short period before dying of exhaustion

It’s been a big week for Chinese space exploration. First a successful test flight of Zhuque-3 and this week we learned of their plans to explore the Moon’s South Pole. Previous missions have even returned samples to Earth but the Chinese landers have yet to explore more southerly areas of the Moon. Chang’e-6 is due to launch in a few months to collect samples from the far side of the Moon while Chang’e-7 launches in 2026 to the Moon’s south pole. 

It’s an exciting prospect to see China continuing their exploration of the Moon. in a paper recently published, the team from the Natinoal Space Science Centre under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center (sorry, that is a mouthful) explore the scientific goals and the payloads required to reach those targets. One of the key goals is to explore the craters around the south pole to study the water ice lurking in the shadows. 

Scientists have wondered about the existence of water on the Moon for decades but it wasn’t confirmed until 2020. Data returned by NASA’s SOFIA mission finally confirmed that there was water on the surface of the Moon locked up as molecules of H20 inside or possbily just sticking to grains of lunar dust. 

Lunar Craters as imaged by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper. Image Credit: SRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ.

The Chinese team are hunting down water ice in the south pole region where the low height of the Sun above the horizon means the heat arriving at the surface is less intense and doesn’t reach the bottom of the deep craters. It is in these cold regions they hope to find the ice and other volatile substances. 

They are not just hunting water though, they plan to explore the composition and shape or morphology of the lunar surface, the internal structure of the Moon, its magnetic fields and the general environment around the south pole. An intriguing element of the mission is the Lunar-Earth Very-Long baseline interferometry experiment which is exploring the viability of an interferometer with elements based on the Earth and on the Moon to give unprecedented resolution data.

In total, and to address all of these mission objectives, Change’e-7 will be home to a total of 18 payloads. The probe will consist of an orbiter, a lander, a rover and if that wasn’t enough, a miniature flying probe. If all goes to plan the lander will touchdown on the rim of a crater illuminated in sunlight near the south pole along with the rover and flying probe.  The probe will be armed to its teeth with instruments including; cameras, radar, water and minieral analyzers, spectrometers, magnetometers, seismograph and a volatiles detector. 

It is an ambious mission, chiefly due to the amount of technology and mission objectives but if it does all go well then Chang’e-7 will help us to learn more about the south pole of the Moon and also help to pave the way for a future long term lunar research station.

Source : China reveals goals, payloads of its lunar water-ice probe mission

The post China Reveals How it’s Planning to Search for Water Ice at the Moon’s South Pole appeared first on Universe Today.

Owls are famously good at rotating their heads, but now anatomical findings suggest they really could go a full 360 degrees without injuring themselves

Venus is only slightly smaller than the Earth, and so has enjoyed billions of years of a warm heart. But for this planet, sometimes called Earth’s sister, that heat has betrayed it. That planet is now wrapped in suffocating layers of a poisonous atmosphere made of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. The pressures on the surface reach almost 100 times the air pressure at Earth’s sea level. The average temperatures are over 700 degrees Fahrenheit, more than hot enough to melt lead, while the deepest valleys see records of over 900 degrees.

If Venus is indeed Earth’s sister, she’s a twisted one. Like Mars, we suspect that Venus also once hosted a thinner, balmier atmosphere and a surface replete with liquid water oceans. The reasoning here is a little more tenuous than for Mars – where we can literally see the evidence for water before our very eyes – but the thinking is that both Venus and Earth formed in a roughly similar fashion, in roughly the same orbits with roughly the same material. Thus we should have been born with roughly the same amount of water.

Like Earth, most of that water would have been chemically bound up in rock, buried deep in the mantle. But some of it may have leeched to the surface or been delivered by hosts of water-rich comets shortly after formation, building up a supply on the surface, once again stabilized by a thick atmosphere.

What doomed Venus was not any fault of its own, but our own treacherous Sun. As stars age they gradually brighten. Day by day it’s imperceptible, but over the course of millions of years it completely changes the character of a star. Billions of years ago our Sun’s habitable zone was shifted inwards compared to where it rests now, but with increased brightness comes increased heat, and  that habitable zone steadily creeps outwards over time.

Did Venus ever host life? I doubt we’ll ever know, given the excruciating temperatures on the surface that make exploration nearly impossible. But it’s likely that it had water and a rich atmosphere – the basic ingredients were there. But if life did gain a foothold it did not last long. As our Sun aged, Venus got warmer and warmer. On a warmer planet, more water exists as vapor in the atmosphere than as liquid on the surface.

At first the changes were small, with nothing more than a higher dew point to mark the inexorable path to destruction. But at some point in the past – we are not sure exactly when – Venus reached a tipping point. With too much water vapor, the atmosphere of Venus became too good at trapping the heat radiating from the surface. That radiation could not penetrate the haze and make into space, but instead was ensnared within the atmosphere itself, heating it up.

What came next was, at least, mercifully quick. Venus entered a feedback loop, dumping more heat into the atmosphere, which boiled the oceans into more vapor, which increased the temperatures, and so on. First the shallow lakes and streams were gone, then came the deeper oceans, until every scrap of water was blowing in the winds of the atmosphere.

With its proximity to the ever-brightening Sun, the water vapor did not last long. Solar radiation pummeled it, disassociating its chemical bonds and sending the oxygen and hydrogen flying away, joining a grim procession beyond our solar system.

If Venus had plate tectonics like the Earth, then this is where that process came to end. With no water to act a lubricant, the great slow grinding of the plates seized up, locking the crust in place. This constant churning acts as a natural sink for carbon: the carbon dioxide binds to rocks which get pulled deep into the mantle, preventing too much carbon from building up in the atmosphere.

But without the cleansing effect of plate tectonics, carbon dioxide levels rose to dangerous heights, its own ability to absorb radiation from the surface choking off any remaining hope for rescuing the planet. Eventually the atmosphere would pile upon itself until it reached its present swollen size.

As our Sun aged, Venus strangled itself.

Venus is not alone in sharing that fate, for the Sun has not yet reached its final days. It continues to brighten, bringing more warmth to the solar system day by day, its habitable zone steadily inching outwards with every passing year.

At some point, approximately 500 million years from now, Venus will not be alone, The Earth’s oceans will boil, our continents will halt their ancient motion, and we will finally be twins with our sister: dead, lifeless, and strangling on our own bloated atmosphere.

The post Why Venus Died appeared first on Universe Today.

We keep finding pancake-like objects in the solar system and it could be because they form in a certain way – from spinning clouds of pebbles

Three fossils of Pachycormus fish from the dinosaur era feature smaller members of the same species in their guts - perhaps showing how the animals got by when food was scarce