Planet greening negated global warming, show NASA maps - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Planet greening negated global warming, show NASA maps.

Since 2000, at least 30% of areas with more leaf coverage were cooled by it, the research noted

The greening of the planet changed the movement of air near the land surface between 2000 and 2014 in ways that offset some warming, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has shown in its latest maps.

Remote sensing scientists from at the Boston University had found in 2019 that vegetation cover increased globally by five per cent since the early 2000s. In 2020, the group showed that increase in greenness led to a slight offset in global temperatures. This study was published in Science Advances.

The planet has been getting greener in the last 40 years. Until now, scientists believed vegetation could alter temperatures at the surface by the way the leaf area changed how much sunlight it absorbed or reflected. More greenery can also change how well water can penetrate and be retained by soil and leaves.

In the latest research, however, scientists found that the strongest cooling effect was how the increasing leaf cover led to increased or decreased drag and turbulence in the air above. This meant that the aerodynamic resistance was less with more vegetation.

Trends in the leaf area index (LAI) around the world from 2000 to 2014. LAI is a measure of the amount of leaf area relative to ground area during the growing season. Source: NASA

Extra leaves, according to the researchers, can allow more heat and water vapor to rise into the atmosphere. Extra leaves may also increase the amount of water transpired by plants, thereby allowing even more water to be transferred. The moisture helps carry away a significant amount of heat from the ground level and lead to cooler surfaces.

The researchers found that since 2000, at least 30 per cent of areas with more leaf coverage were cooled by it, while 5 per cent have grown warmer.

Chi Chen, one of the authors of the study, said: “In the fight against climate change, plants are the lonely-only defenders. Stopping deforestation and ecologically sensible large-scale tree-planting could be one simple, but not sufficient, defense against climate change.”

The authors noted, however, that the cooling effect from extra vegetation was large from an energy dissipation perspective, but wa quite small compared to the pace and intensity of global warming. (Source: downtoearth)

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Planet greening negated global warming, show NASA maps.

New NASA model to help assess hange in carbon concentrations from forests - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

New NASA model to help assess hange in carbon concentrations from forests.

Tropical forests absorbed more carbon than other forest types, released more carbon into atmosphere due to deforestation, degradation, the study found.

Scientists have devised a new method to better understand the role of various forest types in the global carbon cycle. Tropical forests, for instance, are responsible for the largest component of global carbon fluctuations, according to a study published by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

A group of researchers, including NASA scientists, has created a new way to assess how the changes in forests over the past two decades impacted carbon concentrations in the atmosphere.

They found that tropical forest absorbed more carbon than other forest types and released more carbon into the atmosphere due to deforestation and degradation.

The study was published February 4, 2021. The method tapped into numerous sources, including ground, airborne and satellite data, to create the “first consistent global framework for estimating the carbon flux specifically for forests,” according to the research.

Forests around the world serve as carbon sinks: They absorbed around 15.6 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere each year between 2001 and 2019. At the same time, deforestation, fires, among other disturbances released 8.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

The study accentuated the lack of uniformity in data on global carbon estimates. The data varies between countries, but scientists expressed hope that the new method will help arrive at better data sets.

NASA’s Carbon Monitoring Systems Biomass Pilot is expected to further improve understanding of carbon removal rates across forest landscapes. It comprises:

• Satellite and field data to improve estimates of vegetation and carbon stocks

• NASA’s ICESat-2

• Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), a laser-equipped instrument aboard the International Space Station that records the three-dimensional structures of the world’s temperate and tropical forests

The new approach, according to scientists, also helped identify the forest types that have higher uncertainties. The framework could help countries reduce carbon emissions for which accurate and current data is needed. (Source: Livemint)

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New NASA model to help assess hange in carbon concentrations from forests.

Jupiter’s atmosphere has more water than previously thought: NASA - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Jupiter’s atmosphere has more water than previously thought: NASA.

Jupiter was likely the first planet to form, and it contains most of the gas and dust that wasn’t incorporated into the Sun, finds scientists

Water makes up about 0.25% of the molecules in Jupiter’s atmosphere along its equator — almost three times that of the Sun, according to a study based on data from NASA’s Juno mission launched in 2011. The study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Tuesday, provided the first findings on the gas giant’s abundance of water since the space agency’s 1995 Galileo mission.

According to the researchers, including those from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the U.S., Jupiter may be extremely dry compared to the Sun — a comparison based not on liquid water, but on the presence of its components, oxygen and hydrogen.
They said Jupiter was likely the first planet to form, and it contains most of the gas and dust that wasn’t incorporated into the Sun.
The leading theories about its formation rest on the amount of water the planet soaked up, the NASA scientists explained in a statement.
Water abundance also has important implications for the gas giant’s meteorology and internal structure, they said.
“Just when we think we have things figured out, Jupiter reminds us how much we still have to learn,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in the U.S.
“Juno’s surprise discovery that the atmosphere was not well mixed even well below the cloud tops is a puzzle that we are still trying to figure out. No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet,” Bolton said.
Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) observes Jupiter from above using six antennas that measure atmospheric temperature at multiple depths simultaneously, NASA noted in a statement.
The researchers said the MWR takes advantage of the fact that water absorbs certain wavelengths of microwave radiation, the same trick used by microwave ovens to quickly heat food.
According to the scientists, the measured temperatures are used to constrain the amount of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere, as both molecules absorb microwave radiation.
They initially concentrated on the equatorial region because the atmosphere there appeared to be more well-mixed, even at depth, than in other regions.
From its orbital perch, the radiometer was able to collect data from a far greater depth into Jupiter’s atmosphere than the Galileo probe — 150 kilometres, where the pressure reaches about 480 psi, the researchers said.
“We found the water in the equator to be greater than what the Galileo probe measured,” said Cheng Li, a Juno scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Because the equatorial region is very unique at Jupiter, we need to compare these results with how much water is in other regions,” Li said. (Source: The Hindu)


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Jupiter’s atmosphere has more water than previously thought: NASA.

Water Vapor Confirmed on Jupiter’s Moon Europa by NASA Scientists - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Water Vapor Confirmed on Jupiter’s Moon Europa by NASA Scientists.

Forty years ago, a Voyager spacecraft snapped the first closeup images of Europa, one of Jupiter’s 79 moons. These revealed brownish cracks slicing the moon’s icy surface, which give Europa the look of a veiny eyeball. Missions to the outer solar system in the decades since have amassed enough additional information about Europa to make it a high-priority target of investigation in NASA’s search for life.

What makes this moon so alluring is the possibility that it may possess all of the ingredients necessary for life. Scientists have evidence that one of these ingredients, liquid water, is present under the icy surface and may sometimes erupt into space in huge geysers. But no one has been able to confirm the presence of water in these plumes by directly measuring the water molecule itself. Now, an international research team led out of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has detected the water vapor for the first time above Europa’s surface. The team measured the vapor by peering at Europa through one of the world’s biggest telescopes in Hawaii.
Confirming that water vapor is present above Europa helps scientists better understand the inner workings of the moon. For example, it helps support an idea, of which scientists are confident, that there’s a liquid water ocean, possibly twice as big as Earth’s, sloshing beneath this moon’s miles-thick ice shell. Another source of water for the plumes, some scientists suspect, could be shallow reservoirs of melted water ice not far below Europa’s surface. It’s also possible that Jupiter’s strong radiation field is stripping water particles from Europa’s ice shell, though the recent investigation argued against this mechanism as the source of the observed water.
“Essential chemical elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur) and sources of energy, two of three requirements for life, are found all over the solar system. But the third — liquid water — is somewhat hard to find beyond Earth,” said Lucas Paganini, a NASA planetary scientist who led the water detection investigation. “While scientists have not yet detected liquid water directly, we’ve found the next best thing: water in vapor form.”
Paganini and his team reported in the journal Nature Astronomy on November 18, 2019, that they detected enough water releasing from Europa (5,202 pounds, or 2,360 kilograms, per second) to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool within minutes. Yet, the scientists also found that the water appears infrequently, at least in amounts large enough to detect from Earth, said Paganini: “For me, the interesting thing about this work is not only the first direct detection of water above Europa, but also the lack thereof within the limits of our detection method.”
Indeed, Paganini’s team detected the faint yet distinct signal of water vapor just once throughout 17 nights of observations between 2016 and 2017. Looking at the moon from the W. M. Keck Observatory atop the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, the scientists saw water molecules at Europa’s leading hemisphere, or the side of the moon that’s always facing in the direction of the moon’s orbit around Jupiter. (Europa, like Earth’s moon, is gravitationally locked to its host planet, so the leading hemisphere always faces the direction of the orbit, while the trailing hemisphere always faces in the opposite direction.)
They used a spectrograph at the Keck Observatory that measures the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres through the infrared light they emit or absorb. Molecules such as water emit specific frequencies of infrared light as they interact with solar radiation.
Mounting Evidence for Water
Before the recent water vapor detection, there have been many tantalizing findings on Europa. The first came from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which measured perturbations in Jupiter’s magnetic field near Europa while orbiting the gas giant planet between 1995 and 2003. The measurements suggested to scientists that electrically conductive fluid, likely a salty ocean beneath Europa’s ice layer, was causing the magnetic disturbances. When researchers analyzed the magnetic disturbances more closely in 2018, they found evidence of possible plumes.
In the meantime, scientists announced in 2013 that they had used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to detect the chemical elements hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) — components of water (H2O) — in plume-like configurations in Europa’s atmosphere. And a few years later, other scientists used Hubble to gather more evidence of possible plume eruptions when they snapped photos of finger-like projections that appeared in silhouette as the moon passed in front of Jupiter.
“This first direct identification of water vapor on Europa is a critical confirmation of our original detections of atomic species, and it highlights the apparent sparsity of large plumes on this icy world” said Lorenz Roth, an astronomer and physicist from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm who led the 2013 Hubble study and was a co-author of this recent investigation.
Roth’s research, along with other previous Europa findings, have only measured components of water above the surface. The trouble is that detecting water vapor at other worlds is challenging. Existing spacecraft have limited capabilities to detect it, and scientists using ground-based telescopes to look for water in deep space have to account for the distorting effect of water in Earth’s atmosphere. To minimize this effect, Paganini’s team used complex mathematical and computer modeling to simulate the conditions of Earth’s atmosphere so they could differentiate Earth’s atmospheric water from Europa’s in data returned by the Keck spectrograph.
“We performed diligent safety checks to remove possible contaminants in ground-based observations,” said Avi Mandell, a Goddard planetary scientist on Paganini’s team. “But, eventually, we’ll have to get closer to Europa to see what’s really going on.”
Scientists will soon be able get close enough to Europa to settle their lingering questions about the inner and outer workings of this possibly habitable world. The forthcoming Europa Clipper mission, expected to launch in the mid-2020s, will round out half a century of scientific discovery that started with a modest photo of a mysterious, veiny eyeball.
When it arrives at Europa, the Clipper orbiter will conduct a detailed survey of Europa’s surface, deep interior, thin atmosphere, subsurface ocean, and potentially even smaller active vents. Clipper will try to take images of any plumes and sample the molecules it finds in the atmosphere with its mass spectrometers. It will also seek out a fruitful site from which a future Europa lander could collect a sample. These efforts should further unlock the secrets of Europa and its potential for life. (Source: scitechdaily.com)


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Water Vapor Confirmed on Jupiter’s Moon Europa by NASA Scientists.

NASA’s Voyager 2 becomes second spacecraft to reach interstellar space - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

NASA’s Voyager 2 becomes second spacecraft to reach interstellar space.

This makes Voyager 2 the second human-made object to journey out of the Sun’s influence, following the Voyager 1’s solar exit in 2012.

More than four decades after beginning its epic journey, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has crossed the elusive boundary that marks the edge of the Sun’s realm and the start of interstellar space, scientists have announced.
According to the researchers at the University of Iowa in the US, Voyager 2 has entered the interstellar medium (ISM), the region of space outside the bubble-shaped boundary produced by wind streaming outward from the Sun.
This makes Voyager 2 the second human-made object to journey out of the Sun’s influence, following the US space agency’s Voyager 1’s solar exit in 2012.
The study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, confirmed Voyager 2’s passage on November 5, 2018, into the ISM by noting a definitive jump in plasma density detected by a plasma wave instrument on the spacecraft.
The marked increase in plasma density is evidence of Voyager 2 journeying from the hot, lower-density plasma characteristic of the solar wind to the cool, higher-density plasma of interstellar space, the researchers said.
It is also similar to the plasma density jump experienced by Voyager 1 when it crossed into interstellar space, they said.
“In a historical sense, the old idea that the solar wind will just be gradually whittled away as you go further into interstellar space is simply not true,” said Professor Don Gurnett from the University of Iowa, and corresponding author on the study.
“We show with Voyager 2 — and previously with Voyager 1 — that there’s a distinct boundary out there. It’s just astonishing how fluids, including plasmas, form boundaries,” Gurnett said.
Voyager 2’s entry into the ISM occurred at 119.7 astronomical units (AU), or more than 11 billion miles from the Sun. Voyager 1 passed into the ISM at 122.6 AU.
The spacecraft were launched within weeks of each other by NASA in 1977, with different mission goals and trajectories through space. Yet they crossed into the ISM at basically the same distances from the Sun.
That gives valuable clues to the structure of the heliosphere — the bubble, shaped much like a wind sock, created by the Sun’s wind as it extends to the boundary of the solar system, the researchers said.
“It implies that the heliosphere is symmetric, at least at the two points where the Voyager spacecraft crossed,” said Bill Kurth, University of Iowa research scientist and a co-author on the study.
“That says that these two points on the surface are almost at the same distance,” Kurth said.
“There’s almost a spherical front to this. It’s like a blunt bullet,” Gurnett added.
Data from the instrument on Voyager 2 also gives additional clues to the thickness of the heliosheath, the outer region of the heliosphere and the point where the solar wind piles up against the approaching wind in interstellar space, which Gurnett likens to the effect of a snowplow on a city street. (Source: The Hindu)


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NASA’s Voyager 2 becomes second spacecraft to reach interstellar space.

Earth's surface heating up, Nasa study confirms - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Earth's surface heating up, Nasa study confirms.

Satellite measurements by Nasa researchers have verified the ground-based data which shows the Earth's surface has been warming globally over the past 15 years.

The team used measurements of the 'skin' temperature of the Earth taken by a satellite-based infrared measurement system called AIRS (Atmospheric Infra-Red Sounder) from 2003 to 2017.

The researchers compared these with station-based analyses of surface air temperature anomalies -- principally the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP).
The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found a high level of consistency between the two datasets over the past 15 years.
"AIRS data complement GISTEMP because they are at a higher spatial resolution than GISTEMP, and have more complete global coverage," said Joel Susskind, from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in the US.
"Both data sets demonstrate the Earth's surface has been warming globally over this period, and that 2016, 2017, and 2015 have been the warmest years in the instrumental record, in that order," Susskind said in a statement.
"This is important because of the intense interest in the detail of how estimates of global and regional temperature change are constructed from surface temperature data, and how known imperfections in the raw data are handled," he said.
AIRS data reflects skin temperature at the surface of the ocean, land and snow/ice covered regions.
Surface-based data are a blend of two metre surface air data anomalies over land, and bulk sea surface temperature anomalies in the ocean.
To compare the two, the researchers constructed monthly grid point climatologies for each calendar month and for each set of data, by averaging the monthly values over 2003 to 2017.
"Interestingly, our findings revealed that the surface-based data sets may be underestimating the temperature changes in the Arctic," said Gavin Schmidt, from Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
"This means the warming taking place at the poles may be happening more quickly than previously thought," Schmidt said. (Source: The economic times)


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Earth's surface heating up, Nasa study confirms.

World is getting greener, India and China leading efforts: NASA study - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

World is getting greener, India and China leading efforts: NASA study.

China alone accounts for 25 per cent of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6 per cent of global vegetated area.

India and China are leading the global greening effort, which is quite contrary to the general perception worldwide, a latest NASA study said Monday, observing that the world is a greener place than it was 20 years ago.

The NASA study based on data received and analysed from its satellite said that India and China are leading in greening on land. "China and India account for one-third of the greening but contain only 9 per cent of the planet's land area covered in vegetation," said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University.

"That is a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from over exploitation," he said.

The study published on February 11, in the journal Nature Sustainability said that recent satellite data reveal a greening pattern that is strikingly prominent in China and India and overlaps with croplands world-wide.

China alone accounts for 25 per cent of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6 per cent of global vegetated area.

The greening in China is from forests (42 per cent) and croplands (32 per cent), but in India it is mostly from croplands (82 percent) with minor contribution from forests (4.4 per cent), the NASA study said.

China is engineering ambitious programmes to conserve and expand forests with the goal of mitigating land degradation, air pollution and climate change.

Food production in China and India has increased by over 35 per cent since 2000 mostly owing to an increase in harvested area through multiple cropping facilitated by fertiliser use and surface- and/or groundwater irrigation.

When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and a co-author of the study.

This study was made possible thanks to a two-decade-long data record from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. Now with the MODIS data, we see that humans are also contributing, she said.

Observing that once people realise there is a problem, they tend to fix it, Nemani said in the 1970s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss was not good.

In the 1990s, people realized it, and today things have improved. Humans are incredibly resilient. That's what we see in the satellite data, she said.

According to the paper, how the greening trend may change in the future depends on numerous factors.

For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change, it said.

The researchers also pointed out that the gain in greenness around the world does not necessarily offset the loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions such as Brazil and Indonesia. There are consequences for sustainability and biodiversity in those ecosystems beyond the simple greenness of the landscape, the research study said. (Source: The Business Standard)

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World is getting greener, India and China leading efforts: NASA study.

NASA launches Parker Solar Probe mission to study the sun up close - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

NASA launches Parker Solar Probe mission to study the sun up close.

A NASA mission to travel closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft is on its way after a successful launch from Cape Canaveral.

The United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy carrying NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 3:31 a.m. Eastern. Controllers scrubbed a launch attempt the previous day because of technical issues late in the countdown. The spacecraft separated from its kick stage 43 minutes after launch.
The 700-kilogram spacecraft required not only a Delta 4 Heavy but also a Star 48BV kick stage from Northrop Grumman in order to counteract the Earth’s rotational speed around the sun, allowing it to fall closer to the sun. The spacecraft will also perform a series of Venus flybys, starting in early October, to bring it closer to the sun.
Parker Solar Probe will perform its first close approach to the sun in November, coming within about 24.8 million kilometers. Future flybys will bring it even closer, eventually coming as close as 6.1 million kilometers, far closer than any previous spacecraft. During those later close approaches, the spacecraft will be traveling at up to 695,000 kilometers per hour.
Those close approaches are needed for Parker’s instruments to study the solar wind and the corona. By taking measurements from within the corona, scientists hope to better understand how it is heated to temperatures of millions of degrees. The up-close observations may reveal new information about solar eruptions and the solar wind.
“We know the magnetic field is the real key. We know this is why we’re making this daring mission,” said Nicola Fox of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, project science for the mission, during a pre-launch briefing Aug. 9. “We’re going to go into the transition from where the magnetic field is dominant to where that coronal material dominates the magnetic field.”
Development of Parker Solar Probe — previously known as Solar Probe Plus — dates back a decade, but the idea of sending a spacecraft close to the sun is far older. Concepts for missions to travel to the sun date back to the late 1950s, around the time that University of Chicago physicist Eugene Parker, for whom the mission is named, first proposed the solar wind.
“For the science community, and some of the engineering community, it’s really been 60 years,” said Andy Driesman, project manager for the mission, during the pre-launch briefing. “You can trace back papers and read engineering reports from the ’60s and ’70s about this mission, about different concepts, different ways to get this environment.”
What made the mission feasible was a set of technologies, including a heat shield that protects the spacecraft during its close approach to the sun as well as an active cooling system for the solar panels. The spacecraft also needed to be small enough that it could be launched on the desired trajectory.
“Certainly, finding the right materials” was key, said Fox. “It isn’t just a case of surviving the incredible heat when we’re close to the sun. We come out around Venus and it’s cold there, which means these materials have to withstand heating and cooling, very extreme changes in temperatures.”
Parker Solar Probe has a primary mission of 24 orbits around the sun through the middle of 2025. Driesman, though, said he was optimistic that the spacecraft could operate far longer. “As long as we have propellant on board, we’re going to continue to take science data,” he said.
The mission will ultimately end when the spacecraft runs out of attitude control propellant. “It will lose attitude control and those sensitive bits of the spacecraft, which we worked so hard to protect, will eventually transition to the sun,” he said. “The way I like to think about it is that, hopefully in a long, long period of time, 10 to 20 years, there’s going to be a carbon disk floating around the sun in its orbit. That carbon disk will be around until the end of the solar system.”


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NASA launches Parker Solar Probe mission to study the sun up close.

NASA Launches Online Toolkit To Promote Commercial Use Of Satellite Data - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

NASA Launches Online Toolkit To Promote Commercial Use Of Satellite Data.

The "Remote Sensing Toolkit" provides a simple system that quickly identifies relevant sources based on user input, NASA said in a statement on Thursday.

NASA has launched an online toolkit to make it easier for users to find, analyse and utilise the most relevant satellite data for their research, business projects or conservation efforts.
The "Remote Sensing Toolkit" provides a simple system that quickly identifies relevant sources based on user input, NASA said in a statement on Thursday.
The toolkit is designed to help users search for data, as well as ready-to-use tools and code to build new tools.
"This new tool makes finding and using NASA satellite data easier than ever before, and we hope it sparks innovation among the entrepreneurial community and leads to further commercialisation of NASA technology and benefits people across the world," said Daniel Lockney, NASA''s Technology Transfer programme executive.
"Our mission to bring NASA technology down to Earth is expanding with the release of this remote sensing toolkit," Mr Lockney said.
Through its constellation of Earth observation satellites, NASA collects petabytes of data each year.
The variety of open source tools created to access, analyse and utilise the data from these satellites is familiar to millions of science users, but accessing and utilising this data remains daunting for many potential commercial users.
For example, NASA''s remote-sensing data and tools are spread out across dozens of sites.
The NASA Technology Transfer programme reviewed more than 50 websites and found that no source provided a comprehensive collection of information or a single access point to begin a search.
This prompted the US space agency to introduce the Remote Sensing Toolkit.
"Remote Sensing Toolkit will help grow the number of users who put NASA''s free and open data archive to work for people," said Kevin Murphy of NASA''s Earth Science Division in Washington.


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NASA Launches Online Toolkit To Promote Commercial Use Of Satellite Data.

NASA launches spacecraft to study the interior of Mars for the first time -Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis

NASA launches spacecraft to study the interior of Mars for the first time.

The InSight mission will take six months to reach the Red Planet after a 301-million-mile journey.

The United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Saturday launched a spacecraft to Mars to study the deep interior of the Red Planet for the first time. The InSight mission will take six months to reach its destination, 301 million miles away.
The mission was sent to space with the help of an Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 4.05 am local time (4.35 pm Indian time). This was the first spacecraft sent to another planet from the California base – NASA prefers Florida on the East Coast for interplanetary launches to take advantage of the direction of the earth’s rotation.
The spacecraft reached the orbit 13 minutes and 16 seconds after its launch. It is scheduled to land on Mars on November 26, where it will conduct science operations for two Earth years, or about one Martian year.
The 360-kg spacecraft is the 21st mission to Mars by the US.
“InSight will not only teach us about Mars, it will enhance our understanding of formation of other rocky worlds like Earth and the Moon, and thousands of planets around other stars,” said NASA scientist Thomas Zurbuchen.


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NASA launches spacecraft to study the interior of Mars for the first time.

Rocket-control glitch delays launch of NASA's planet-hunting satellite - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis

Rocket-control glitch delays launch of NASA's planet-hunting satellite.

TESS will help catalog at least 100 more rocky exoplanets for further study.

An 11th- hour technical glitch prompted SpaceX to postpone its planned launch on Monday of a new NASA space telescope designed to detect worlds beyond our solar system.

SpaceX halted the countdown a little more than two hours before its Falcon 9 rocket had been scheduled to carry the Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, into orbit from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Space Exploration Technologies, as billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's private launch service is formally known, said on Twitter that the blast-off was scrubbed due to unspecified problems in the rocket's guidance control system.
The launch was rescheduled for 6:51 p.m. EDT (22:51 GMT) on Wednesday.
Search for exoplanets
The two-year, $337 million TESS mission is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which has discovered the bulk of some 3,700 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years and is running out of fuel. NASA expects to pinpoint thousands more previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or ”super-Earth”-sized — no larger than twice as big as our home planet.
Those are believed the most likely to feature rocky surfaces or oceans, and are thus considered the best candidates for life to evolve. Scientists said they hope TESS will ultimately help catalog at least 100 more rocky exoplanets for further study in what has become one of astronomy's newest fields of exploration.
Transit photometry
Roughly the size of a refrigerator with solar-panel wings and equipped with four special cameras, TESS will take about 60 days to reach a highly elliptical, first-of-a-kind orbit looping it between Earth and the moon every two and a half weeks. Like Kepler, TESS will use a detection method called transit photometry, which looks for periodic, repetitive dips in the visible light from stars caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of them.
But TESS will scan a broader swath of the heavens to focus on 200,000 pre-selected stars that are relatively nearby — some of them just dozens of light years away — and thus among the brightest as seen from Earth. That makes them better suited for sensitive follow-up analysis of exoplanet candidates TESS locates.
TESS will concentrate on stars called red dwarfs, smaller, cooler and longer-lived than our sun. Red dwarfs also have a high propensity for Earth-sized, presumably rocky planets, making them potentially fertile ground for further scrutiny. (Source: The Hindu)


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Rocket-control glitch delays launch of NASA's planet-hunting satellite.

NASA’s new exoplanet-hunting telescope set to launch on Monday - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis

NASA’s new exoplanet-hunting telescope set to launch on Monday.

NASA’s next exoplanet-hunting telescope is preparing for launch. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is scheduled to blast off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on 16 April

TESS is take up the mantle of the Kepler Space Telescope, which is expected to run out of fuel by the end of this year. Kepler has found more than 5000 exoplanet candidates so far, and confirmed about half of them. TESS will be able to search 350 times more area of the sky than Kepler can, and is expected to find about 20,000 exoplanets in its first two years alone.
It will take about two months after launch to manouevre the satellite into its orbit – about half as far from Earth as the moon – and test its cameras. “After that, there’ll just be a flood of information,” says the mission’s principal investigator, George Ricker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Eyes on the sky
TESS will use the same transit method Kepler used to find planets. This involves watching a star for dips in its light as a planet passes between the star and the telescope. How often the dips repeat indicates how fast the planet circles its host star, and the amount of light that’s blocked tells us the size of the distant world.
Rather than looking at distant stars in a small area of sky, like Kepler did, TESS will look at closer stars over 85 per cent of the sky. It is optimised to observe smaller, cooler stars that emit mostly red light.
“90 per cent of the stars in the Milky Way emit in those red wavelengths, and then seem to have more planets than stars like the sun, especially smaller Earth-sized planets,” says Ricker. “Nature’s really saying, ‘look here, look here’ and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Because those stars are so nearby and rich with planets, they will be ideal targets for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due to launch in 2020. JWST will examine exoplanet atmospheres for signatures of life, which is only possible when their stars are relatively close.


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NASA’s new exoplanet-hunting telescope set to launch on Monday.

NASA sending first-ever mission to study Mars' deep interior - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis

NASA sending first-ever mission to study Mars' deep interior.

In a bid to study the deep interior of the Red Planet and find traces of how it was formed, NASA is all set to send a first-ever such mission to Mars.

Scheduled to launch on May 5, NASA's Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) -- a stationary lander -- will be dedicated to explore Mars' deep interior.
It also will be the first NASA mission since the Apollo moon landings to place a seismometer, a device that measures quakes, on the soil of another planet, the US space agency said in a statement on Friday.
Bruce Banerdt is the principal investigator for InSight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
"In some ways, InSight is like a scientific time machine that will bring back information about the earliest stages of Mars' formation 4.5 billion years ago," Banerdt said.
"It will help us learn how rocky bodies form, including Earth, its moon, and even planets in other solar systems," he added.
InSight carries a suite of sensitive instruments to gather data and, unlike a rover mission, these instruments require a stationary lander from which they can carefully be placed on and below the Martian surface.
Looking deep into Mars will let scientists understand how different its crust, mantle and core are from Earth.
Several European partners have contributed instruments and key components to the InSight mission.
France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales led a multinational team that built an ultra-sensitive seismometer for detecting marsquakes.
The German Aerospace Centre (DLR) developed a thermal probe that can bury itself up to 16 feet underground and measure heat flowing from inside the planet.
"InSight is a truly international space mission," said Tom Hoffman, project manager at JPL.
"Our partners have delivered incredibly capable instruments that will make it possible to gather unique science after we land," he added.
InSight currently is at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California undergoing final preparation before launch.
In April, the spacecraft will be mounted to its rocket, connections between them will be checked and the launch team will go through a final training.
"This next month will be exciting," Banerdt said. "We've got some final work to do, but we're almost ready to go to Mars." (Source: The Business Standard)


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NASA sending first-ever mission to study Mars' deep interior.