The Мoon is shrinking, causing surface creases and shocks underneath it, AFP writes. Data is from the NASA spacecraft Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which flies through an elliptical trajectory between 20 and 160 kilometers above the Moon’s surface and takes pictures and other measurements. advertisement A survey of more than 12,000 images indicates that one of the basin at the North Pole of the Moon, considered geologically dead, actually cracks and moves. Unlike the Earth, the moon has no tectonic plates and the only activity is noticeable because of the slow heat loss since it was formed 4.5 billion years...
The rivers on Mars were wider and deeper than those on Earth, according to a publication in the Science Advances Magazine. Up to this conclusion, scientists reached an analysis of 200 dry river beds on the surface of the neighboring planet. Wide and deep rivers have existed on Mars for a surprisingly long period. This makes their disappearance even more mysterious and inexplicable. “We could not explain why there were lakes and rivers on Mars, and the current discoveries make the question even more incomprehensible” writes Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago. ”It turns out that wide and deep...
US Vice President Mike Pens challenged NASA to send people to the Moon by 2024. Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator, accepted the challenge and announced that the deadline is sufficient. Pens wants a little more dynamics from NASA’s space projects. During a meeting at Alabama Space Center, he announced, that sending astronauts to the Moon, for up to 5 years, is in the goals of the current presidential administration. “Challenge accepted. Now let’s get to work.” Brindenstine said on Twitter. BIG NEWS: President Trump and @VP Pence have directed @NASA to return astronauts to the Moon in the next 5 years.Challenge...
The concept of “day” is so obvious to us, people, that we often get surprised when we realize that the length of the day on other planets can be quite different than here on Earth. Perhaps even more shocking thing is, that so far we did’t know how long is a day on Saturn. Thanks to data collected from the Cassini mission, we have an answer to this long-standing mystery. Saturn spins around its axis for 10 hours, 33 minutes and 38 seconds. The findings are published in the Astrophysical Journal. Planetary scientists often use magnetic fields to determine the...
British and American scientists have proved that billions of years ago the Earth resembled the modern Titan, a satellite of Saturn with an atmosphere and vast seas, high mountains, rivers, dunes, mists. Everything is like Earth’s, but with one difference: the temperature of Saturn’s largest satellite is minus 180 degrees, and rivers and oceans contain hydrocarbons. The results of their research were published in the new issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to scientists, 2.4 billion years ago, the Earth’s atmosphere, like Titan’s, contained huge amounts of methane – a gas produced by microorganisms, the...
Recently processed data from NASA’s Galileo orbiter have allowed spectacular video sequences to be produced from the flyby over Jupiter’s Moon Europa. Europa is the sixth natural satellite of Jupiter in increasing order of distance and the smallest of the four Galilean satellites. It was discovered in 1610 by Galileo and named after Europa, the mother of King Minos of Crete and lover of Zeus. Slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon, Europa is composed mainly of silicates and has an icy crust. It has a core that’s most likely made out of iron and nickel. It has a tenuous atmosphere composed of oxygen,...
Uranus – the giant gas world, located 2.8 million kilometers from the Sun – is quite stormy. The NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured one of these storms, floating in the green-blue atmosphere of the Planet. Literally, the entire North Pole is occupied by hurricane! “Scientists believe this new feature of Uranus is the result of its unique rotation,” NASA writes. Unlike all other planets in the Solar System, Uranus is tipped on its side. This means that the Sun has been shining the North Pole constantly during the local long summer. And this in turn leads to widespread atmospheric...
Our home galaxy is not the thin, clean spiral we had envisioned. Researchers created the first 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy and figured out what makes it warped and twisted. So, we now know that the Milky Way isn’t flat. Scientists from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia have published a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy revealing an unprecedented 3D map of the galaxy we live in. The scientists used the locations of 1339 ‘standard’ stars to map the outline of the Milky Way galaxy called Classical Cepheids....
