Astronomy Archives - Virtual Orbit

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Voyager 1 transmitting data again after Nasa remotely fixes 46-year-old probe | Space

Earth’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has started communicating properly again with Nasa after engineers worked for months to remotely fix the 46-year-old probe.Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which makes and operates the agency’s robotic spacecraft, said in December that the probe – more than 15bn miles (24bn kilometres) away – was sending gibberish code back to Earth.In an update released on Monday, JPL announced the mission team had managed “after some inventive sleuthing” to receive usable data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again,” JPL said. Despite the fault, Voyager 1 had operated normally throughout, it added.Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was designed with the pri...

How our vision of Europa’s habitability is changing

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Astronomy

How our vision of Europa’s habitability is changing

THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — On stage, before a silent assembly of scientists, many of whom are experts on alien worlds, planetary scientist Paul Byrne assumed his position behind the podium. He had come to present research on Europa, a moon of Jupiter that almost certainly harbors a subsurface ocean. The moon is thought to be among the most promising places to explore for life in our solar system. But much of that promise clings to an unknown — the geologic activity of Europa’s seafloor. “I don’t think there’s anything happening on the ocean floor,” said Byrne, of Washington University in St. Louis, to the crowd gathered at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on March 11. input[type="radio"].svelte-1heu7pz{display:none}.payment-option-wrapper....

Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst of All Time Challenges Element Formation Theories

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Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst of All Time Challenges Element Formation Theories

Artist’s visualization of GRB 221009A showing the narrow relativistic jets — emerging from a central black hole — that gave rise to the GRB and the expanding remains of the original star ejected via the supernova explosion. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Northwestern University postdoctoral fellow Peter Blanchard and his team detected the supernova for the first time, confirming GRB 221009A was the result of the collapse of a massive star. The study’s co-authors also found that the event occurred in a dense star forming region of its host galaxy as depicted by the background nebula. Credit: Aaron M. Geller / Northwestern / CIERA / IT Research Computing and Data ServicesJames Webb Space Telescope observations show no sign of heavy elements.In October 2022, an international team of re...

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Juice aces Callisto flyby test

One of the computer-generated images of Jupiter’s moon Callisto that was used to test the capabilities of Juice’s engineering model in March 2024. When Juice's flight model passes the real Callisto in 2031 and offers scientists a tantalising glimpse at the mysterious, cratered alien world, this is how it will appear to the spacecraft's navigation camera. Credit: ESA/Airbus Seven years from now, in April 2031, ESA's Juice mission will fly past Jupiter's moon Callisto, offering scientists a tantalizing glimpse at the mysterious, cratered alien world. That might seem far off, but in the world of spacecraft operations, it ...

The First Atmospheric Rainbow on an Exoplanet?

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Astronomy

The First Atmospheric Rainbow on an Exoplanet?

When light strikes the atmosphere all sorts of interesting things can happen. Water vapor can split sunlight into a rainbow arc of colors, corpuscular rays can stream through gaps in clouds like the light from heaven, and halos and sundogs can appear due to sunlight reflecting off ice crystals. And then there is the glory effect, which can create a colorful almost saint-like halo around objects. Like rainbows, glories are seen when facing away from the light source. They are often confused with circular rainbows because of their similarity, but glories are a unique effect. Rainbows are caused by the refraction of light through water droplets, while glories are caused by the wave interference of light. Because of this, a glory is most apparent when the water droplets of a cloud or fog are...