Sunscreen Rains , The Cameras of Mars, Rogue Worlds And Tiny Suns

I love seeing the sand dunes of Mars, frequently pictured by the MRO.

Beautiful 'linear gullies' on Mars      MRO/NASA/JPL

They  have found a giant planet orbiting a tiny sun , 600 light years away, in the obscure constellation of Columba.
What makes it notable is the bizarre scale (a planet the size of Jupiter orbiting a dwarf star so closely that its year only lasts two days)
Technically, the giant world should not exist at all, especially in such close proximity.
I favour the idea that it is a rogue world, somehow captured by the dwarf sun.
Without an observatory in my vicinity, it's guesswork, but there appear to be a few 'rogue' stars in the constellation.

The Hubble telescope just spotted an exoplanet where it rains sunscreen. At 5000 degrees farenheit, the titanium-oxide rain would hardly be protective...

There is a good deal of excitement at the latest object (A/2017 U1) spotted in our universe -mainly because it appears to have come from another solar system

Indications are that the object is red , similar to Kuiper Belt Object MU69
In which case, is mu69 from another sun , too ?
I find it oddly comforting to know that people are determined to identify and archive these things
 ( thanks to Pedro Lacerda for that link I stumbled across )
The other side of this coin is that we didn't see the asteroid coming, so there is no planned 'sortie' , Bennu style, to gather information about its composition / origins.
Researching this piece led me to this thread from Reddit, which re-affirms my faith in humanity as a curious, knowledge - hungry species...

Red asteroids don't exist- at least, in our solar system- so this points towards A/2017 U1 being an icy, KBO-like object. Why, then, didn't it develop a cometary tail as it passed by the sun? It's honestly confusing. Perhaps the billions? of years it flew through interstellar space drove away all its volatiles?

Clearly there's a lot about the surface composition of interstellar asteroids that we don't know!

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[–]FaceDeer 9 points 10 hours ago 

I'm very happy to have made it to a portion of history where investigating the composition of interstellar asteroids is a thing.

I also learned about the designation which changed from C2017 U1 to A2017 U1 - from a comet to an asteroid, as it did not exhibit a 'tail', outgassing as it passed the sun.
Apparently this unique little red rock will never pass this way again, it came in from the direction of the constellation Lyra, and was heading out towards the Kuiper Belt .

Rearview from Curiosity    NASA/JPL

23 Cameras for the next Mars Mission

In keeping with our current trend for pictures everywhere, the next Mars rover will have 23 cameras - including 3D .
Opportunity rover has a pair of B/W cameras mounted in front to produce stereo images , and another two mounted on the rear of the rover, presumably to monitor bad drivers behind.
The Curiosity rover has 17 cameras. This means that , including the MRO  and Opportunity, there are already 24 cameras on Mars - with another 23 enroute, it won't be long before we have pictures of rovers photographing rovers taking pictures of Mars...

Speaking of rovers armed with cameras,  way back in 1971, the Apollo 17 mission rover had only two cameras and even a compartment for spare film magazines- bulky payloads in the days before Micro sd cards  (although, at least they didn't get so easily lost).
Spare a thought, though, for the nightmare of moon dust in the lens...

Apollo17 Lunar Buggy with ominous ' Secondary life support system'

Please excuse the format problems, I plead ignorance of cut 'n' paste procedure.


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Skycranes Above Mars, Lunar Lava Tubes, Symbiotic Stars and Junocam

Sky-crane being assembled for next Mars mission     NASA/ JPL

After a slight delay, the next Mars mission, InSight, is due to be launched in May 2018.
Its landing will be via 'skycrane', the alternative to impractical and outdated airbags.
The last use of a skycrane was the tense, fraught landing of Curiosity on Mars. At the time it was a  new thing, and given the many previous unsuccessful landings, it was a long shot.
I found myself rooting for the thing to land safely, having heard of the incredible new method - mainly because faulty airbags had been blamed for previous failed landings, including Beagle2, which had that great eccentricity about it - I always root for the underdog, after all.
Fortunately, eleven years after its landing, Beagle2 was spotted on Mars, (and the airbags were not at fault - the solar panels failed to open properly).
So near, yet so far.
For me, the greatest tragedy here was that the inventor of Beagle2,
Professor Colin Pillinger , died in 2014, the year before the rediscovery of his lost lander..

A self tapping probe will plant itself beneath Mars    NASA/JPL/Caltech

I am looking forward to the launch of InSight , which is scheduled for May 2018.
For those who wonder, Insight will be a stationary lander, tasked with drilling beneath the surface, seeking knowledge on the internal geology of Mars .


On the subject of 'beneath the surface' there has been a lot of noise surrounding the recent discovery of lava tubes on the moon, one of which is estimated to be large enough to sustain a city.

Lunar lava tube large enough to contain Philadelphia...                  pic by D. Blair

The illustration uses Philadelphia as an example, but there is clearly enough room for at least one more city, possibly two.
I think there should be an artificial sun powered by nuclear fusion, suspended in the centre

Which gets me wondering-is the whole world contained in a giant lava tube?

In a distant constellation, a pair of stars are permanently entwined in a symbiotic relationship, R Aquarii is an unusual combination of white dwarf and red giant stars.
First recognised a thousand years ago (with the naked eye, apparently).
They have been most recently imaged by Hubble, trapped in their orbiting cycle of 44 years, with the red giant sun being stripped of energy by the hungry white dwarf.
I was going to wax lyrical about a cosmic waltz, but instead, here's the Hubble image , which has been processed by citizen astronomer Judy Schmidt 

                                                        credit: Hubble/Judy Schmidt

Anyone who wishes to try their hand at processing images, here is a link to Juno cam, which has a slew of raw, Jovian imagery for processing !

Metallic Psyche , Inflatable Space Hotels, and The Road Ahead

Missions Map by Olaf  Frohn
Note the lower right hand side, with voyager 1 and 2 indicated ' off route'
more to come !

Hello, I hope 2017 finds you refreshed and raring to go - no? Oh well, straight in with a recent announcement by NASA that they are launching two missions.
The missions are titled Psyche and Lucy - one is to fly to a distant metallic asteroid , which is effectively a drifting core from a puported ' protoplanet '.
The mission, 'Lucy', is a little closer to home, exploring asteroids around the gas giant Jupiter , although the principle is similar - to examine materials dating from the early formation of our solar system..
Further examination of space comes with the IXPE mission selected by NASA , in which telescopes in space will gauge distant x-ray fields emanating from black holes .
This mission is set to launch in 2020.

In other news a series of distant frbs are drawing us to look closer - though at 3 billion light years away, close is a loose term...it seems the main attraction is the sheer power required to output a signal over such a distance - could it be ...

image by Shane Graf 

Alongside the ever increasing list of companies with designs on space travel, is Bigelow Aerospace . 

They hope to create interstellar hotels capable of flight - an admirable , progressive concept. Particularly if said hotels utilise solar sails to reach near light speed.
Of course, 80 % of light speed would mean your hotel is travelling at a fair clip , but the distance to the nearest starfield (Alpha Centauri) is so great, that you'd have plenty of time to work out how to drink a cocktail in zero gravity without looking foolish.
On a serious note, back to Bigelow Aerospace - their first working test is the BEAM unit recently added to the ISS.
Personally, I would have issues with a flimsy pod in space, with nothing between myself and the great unknown...
Aside from the unexplored depths of the Mariana trench (but that's for another discussion), 

there is no greater unknown than space, so it's just as well that Hubble is being used to map a path for the ongoing journeys of Voyagers 1 and 2, now that they are in unexplored territory - a SatNav for the galaxy...hopefully not too many wrong turns up ahead... this is amazing stuff - we're using an orbiting telescope to create a road map for a pair of explorer craft which are billions of miles away!

The future is now - okay, the map is presently about the chemical makeup of the road ahead, but Hubble is marking a wide swathe of space between the two explorers.

pic NASA/ ESA / G Bacon (st/scl)

Clouds on Pluto, Distant Galaxies and Radio Signals

Following the recent announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, you can help in the further discovery of more signals - link here.
In news from the New Horizons team, something is eating away at Pluto, creating a huge gouge in the Western hemisphere.
Don't panic though, it 's probably just material evaporating ...
Another recent discovery is what appear to be actual clouds on Pluto - caveat, I say actual clouds, but these are nitrogen with traces of methane, not water clouds.
Smelly acid rain then, don't forget your brolly.
Or breathing apparatus, obv.

Impossibly hard to see  wispy clouds on Pluto.  pic NASA

This discovery is possible through the ongoing downloads of material from the September flypast by New Horizons.

The downloads will continue until near the end of this year.
It's a slow process - after all, New Horizons is getting further away, heading for a rendezvous in the Oort cloud in 2019, so it is putting serious miles between us , travelling at approximately 30,000 mph in the opposite direction .
Don't forget the download speed is pathetically low; at an underwhelming 2000 bits a second - there are no Wi - Fi relay / booster stations out there !
Clouds on Pluto are exciting news because they could help in the reclassification of Pluto as a planet (remember it was downgraded in 2006) .
This would create a whole new set of problems with the ongoing search for the mysterious Planet X , which would then become a tenth planet in our solar system.

On its way out of service, Hubble has just imaged the most distant object in the known universe at 13 billion light years distant, which makes it just  aspproximately 400 hundred million years from the Big Bang.

JWST artists impression    pic NASA

Anyway, the incoming James Webb Telescope should easily surpass that, perhaps even revealing the finger of The Supreme Being hovering over the button marked ' Start .'

But I digress...

In other news, the source of the mysterious signal FRB 121102 has been pinpointed (approximately) -but they are none the wiser as to what exactly it is .
The actual signals seem to be clustered irregularly, which implies an artificial nature, perhaps designed to be noticed.
Beyond that, there is only speculation at present - but the 'alien megastructure' theory is no longer viable.
To add to the confusion, doubts have already been cast on the validity of the report - the internet is no slouch when it comes to raining on parades !
Despite this, the internet can also have its uses - for instance, here's a link to many Russian films, including the only horror film made in the old USSR 'Viy', and the mesmerising ' Stalker' - pointless and strange ? Exactly, that's why we're here !