Treasure hunt (10/6/22)

Good afternoon, and happy Thursday!

Thanks to everyone who voted in last week's poll! The results are in: 85% of you prefer shorter, more skimmable pieces. I hear you loud and clear, Parallax readers, and am back this week with more bite-sized news stories from across the solar system.

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Orbiter Down

India’s Mars Orbiter has finally bit the dust after eight years in space, ISRO, India’s space agency, announced this week.

The little craft that could was originally designed to collect data about the Red Planet for six months. It far outlived that projected lifespan, having been in Mars orbit since 2014.

The Mars Orbiter, officially named Mangalyaan, made history by notching India as the fourth ever Earthly nation to put a craft into Mars orbit and the first to do so on its first try. The craft was an absolute bargain where deep space missions are concerned, costing only ~$74M—about a tenth of the cost of NASA’s earlier Mars probe.

Mangalyaan was equipped with five science instruments built to survey the planet’s ground structures and atmosphere: a photometer, a methane sensor, a particle mass analyzer, an infrared spectrometer, and a color camera. Over the years, these modest instruments have provided researchers back on Earth with valuable information about ground structures on the planet, methods of atmospheric escape, and even details about the sun’s corona.

The craft was powered with solar panels, but a handful of recent back-to-back solar eclipses—including one that lasted over seven hours—cut off its energy supply. ISRO lost contact with the Mars Orbiter after one of these eclipses, and has now declared that the craft is “non-recoverable.”

We’ll miss you, Mangalyaan.

Clues in the Wreckage

It’s been more than a week since NASA slammed its DART spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in the name of planetary defense. Now, astronomers across the world are examining the data beamed home from the craft, space telescopes, and ground observatories to figure out what exactly happened after the impact.

NASA was aiming to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos. It’s going to take further observation and analysis to determine whether the agency was successful in that goal. But there’s still plenty of room to draw conclusions from what we can see.

Soon after the impact, a glimpse through a powerful telescope would have yielded a view of a plume of ejecta bursting from the impact point. This ejecta, a cloud of rock and dust, was mysteriously arranged in well-formed individual “streamers” rather than in a randomly distributed cone.

This effect is expected when, for example, you drop a pebble into a glass of water, because the water’s surface tension keeps the water molecules sticking together. It’s less expected with loose rock and gravel.

Dr. Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, discussed these strange results in a Twitter thread.

A study published recently in Earth, Planets and Space found that when the size distribution of particles in an impact is bimodal—meaning that the sizes are clustered around two separate peaks—or when the largest particles are ~10x larger than the smallest, the jostling between those particles on impact may be enough for the ejecta to condense into streams. However, as is often the case in never-done-before science, more analysis is needed to draw a solid conclusion.

In the 10 days since impact, astronomers have been tracking and analyzing the ejecta. By now, it has spread out into a vibrant trail of dust and wreckage extending 10,000 km behind the asteroid.

You already know what I’m going to say: more analysis is needed to understand how this trail formed. Puzzling out the details of the process is expected to unveil further details about the asteroid’s structure.

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Other News from the Cosmos

• The Nobel Prize in Physics went to three independent researchers—Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger—for their experiments that proved quantum entanglement.

• NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS) announced a $16M project, called the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment (GEMx), to map critical minerals in the southwestern US.

• TESS, i.e. the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, confirmed the existence of a potential exoplanet and identified a second one in the process.

• Earth-like exoplanets, with oceans, continents, and beaches included, may be more common around red dwarf stars than previously thought, a study from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan suggests.

• China has embarked on a six-year project to build the world’s largest steerable radio telescope.

Rachael's Recs

👀 Keep an eye out: In the wake of DART’s asteroid impact, the editorial board at Nature has called for a stronger commitment to searching for potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids. The writers call on NASA and Congress to devote more funds to NEO Surveyor, a planned infrared space telescope that would scan the skies for incoming asteroids.

🧬 Space for Earth: In a blog post for the ISS National Lab, Stephenie Livingston dove into the Toledo Crystallization Box experiment, which is being used to create protein crystals in microgravity that can be used in medical care back on Earth.

The View from Space

NASA’s Juno spacecraft made a flyby of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa last week, beaming home the first up-close images since the Galileo spacecraft passed by more than twenty years ago. Along the terminator, i.e. the boundary between day and night, you can see the ridges and texture in the ice with extraordinary detail.