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Space News Update — April 1, 2016 —

Contents

In the News

Story 1: Spitzer Maps Climate Patterns on a Super-Earth

Story 2: Another Impact on Jupiter?

Story 3: ALMA's most detailed image of a protoplanetary disc

Departments

The Night Sky

ISS Sighting Opportunities

Space Calendar

NASA-TV Highlights

Food for Thought

Space Image of the Week

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1. Spitzer Maps Climate Patterns on a Super-Earth

Observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have led to the first temperature map of a super-Earth planet -- a rocky planet nearly two times as big as ours. The map reveals extreme temperature swings from one side of the planet to the other, and hints that a possible reason for this is the presence of lava flows.

"Our view of this planet keeps evolving," said Brice Olivier Demory of the University of Cambridge, England, lead author of a new report appearing in the March 30 issue of the journal Nature. "The latest findings tell us the planet has hot nights and significantly hotter days. This indicates the planet inefficiently transports heat around the planet. We propose this could be explained by an atmosphere

that would exist only on the day side of the planet, or by lava flows at the planet surface."

The toasty super-Earth 55 Cancri e is relatively close to Earth at 40 light-years away. It orbits very close to its star, whipping around it every 18 hours. Because of the planet's proximity to the star, it is tidally locked by gravity just as our moon is to Earth. That means one side of 55 Cancri, referred to as the day side, is always cooking under the intense heat of its star, while the night side remains in the dark and is much cooler.

"Spitzer observed the phases of 55 Cancri e, similar to the phases of the moon as seen from the Earth. We were able to observe the first, last quarters, new and full phases of this small exoplanet," said Demory. "In return, these observations helped us build a map of the planet. This map informs us which regions are hot on the planet."

Spitzer stared at the planet with its infrared vision for a total of 80 hours, watching it orbit all the way around its star multiple times. These data allowed scientists to map temperature changes across the entire planet. To their surprise, they found a dramatic temperature difference of 2,340 degrees Fahrenheit (1,300 Kelvin) from one side of the planet to the other. The hottest side is nearly 4,400 degrees Fahrenheit (2,700 Kelvin), and the coolest is 2,060 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 Kelvin).

The fact Spitzer found the night side to be significantly colder than the day side means heat is not being distributed around the planet very well. The data argues against the notion that a thick atmosphere and winds are moving heat around the planet as previously thought. Instead, the findings suggest a planet devoid of a massive atmosphere, and possibly hint at a lava world where the lava would become hardened on the night side and unable to transport heat.

"The day side could possibly have rivers of lava and big pools of extremely hot magma, but we think the night side would have solidified lava flows like those found in Hawaii," said Michael Gillon, University of Liège, Belgium.

The Spitzer data also revealed the hottest spot on the planet has shifted over a bit from where it was expected to be: directly under the blazing star. This shift either indicates some degree of heat recirculation confined to the day side, or points to surface features with extremely high temperatures, such as lava flows.

Additional observations, including from NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, will help to confirm the true nature of 55 Cancri e.

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The new Spitzer observations of 55 Cancri are more detailed thanks to the telescope’s increased sensitivity to exoplanets. Over the past several years, scientists and engineers have figured out new ways to enhance Spitzer’s ability to measure changes in the brightness of exoplanet systems. One method involves precisely characterizing Spitzer’s detectors, specifically measuring “the sweet spot” -- a single pixel on the detector -- which was determined to be optimal for exoplanet studies.

“By understanding the characteristics of the instrument -- and using novel calibration techniques of a small region of a single pixel -- we are attempting to eke out every bit of science possible from a detector that was not designed for this type of high-precision observation,” said Jessica Krick of NASA’s Spitzer Space Science Center, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Source: NASA Return to Contents

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2. Another Impact on Jupiter?

Right now amateur and professional planet watchers around the world are trying to pin down the specifics of an apparent impact on Jupiter back on March 17th. Only within the past few days have two videos emerged showing a brief flash of light right on the edge of Jupiter's disk, near the boundary of the planet's bright Equatorial Zone and its tawny North Equatorial Belt.

Gerrit Kernbauer of Mödling, Austria, posted the first video of the event. "I was observing and filming Jupiter with my Skywatcher Newton 200/1000 Telescope [an 8-inch f/5 reflector]," he recalls. "The seeing was not the best, so I hesitated to process the videos. Nevertheless, 10 days later I looked through the videos and I found this strange light spot that appeared for less than one second on the edge of the planetary disc."

Two days later, Irish observer John McKeon posted his own record of the flash. McKeon was using an 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and ASI120MM camera in Swords, a Dublin suburb. Crucially, he also used a near-infrared filter to reduce the planet's brightness. He was making a 3½-hour-long time-lapse video of Jupiter and its moons, "with a happy coincidence of the impact in the second-to-last capture of the night."

Now planetary imaging specialist Marc Delcroix has obtained the raw videos, processed them to bring out extra detail, and refined the circumstances of the flash. He finds that the brightening lasted just over 1 second. But the timing is off a bit: in Kernbauer's video the flash began at 00:18:35 UT, whereas in McKeon's the onset is 9 seconds later.

Despite the time mismatch, the event appears to be real. Apparently the impacting object, be it an asteroid or comet, was rather small. "Nobody sees any debris field associated with that part of the atmosphere," notes

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Glenn Orton (Jet Propulsion Laboratory). Apparently mission managers decided against slewing the Hubble Space Telescope around to take a quick look.

But March 17th's impact, if the evidence for it holds up, becomes the fifth such event in the past decade. The largest of these occurred July 19, 2009, and it left a distinctly dark "powder burn" in Jupiter's upper atmosphere first spotted by Australian astro-imager Anthony Wesley.

That was followed by three lesser strikes on June 3, 2010 (recorded independently by Wesley and Christopher Go); on August 10, 2010 (independently seen by Masayuki Tachikawa and Kazuo Aoki); and on September 10, 2012 (seen visually by Dan Petersen and independently recorded by George Hall).

Counting the historic multiple-hit crash of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994, that's a grand total of six impacts on Jupiter in the past 22 year — with five of those in the past decade!

At first, there was some speculation that the March 17th flash was somehow linked to Jupiter's close-in moon Amalthea, which was positioned close to where the flash occurred. But that notion has since been ruled out.

For one thing, Delcroix's analysis puts the flash location at a latitude of +12.4°, well north of where Amalthea would have been (and clearly within the NEB). Moreover, "The flash was very like previous impacts into the atmosphere of Jupiter," notes John Rogers, who head the Jupiter observing section of the British Astronomical Association, "and as Jupiter is a much bigger target than Amalthea, it is much more likely to have been on Jupiter."

Source: Sky & Telescope Return to Contents

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3. ALMA's most detailed image of a protoplanetary disc

The star TW Hydrae is a popular target of study for astronomers because of its proximity to Earth (only about 175 light-years away) and its status as an infant star (about 10 million years old). It also has a face-on orientation as seen from Earth. This gives astronomers a rare, undistorted view of the complete protoplanetary disc around the star.

"Previous studies with optical and radio telescopes confirm that TW Hydrae hosts a prominent disc with features that strongly suggest planets are beginning to coalesce," said Sean Andrews with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and lead author on a paper published today in theAstrophysical Journal Letters. "The new ALMA images show the disc in unprecedented detail, revealing a series of concentric dusty bright rings and dark gaps, including intriguing features that may indicate that a planet with an Earth-like orbit is forming there."

Other pronounced gaps that show up in the new images are located three billion and six billion kilometres from the central star, similar to the average distances from the Sun to Uranus and Pluto in the Solar System. They too are likely to be the results of particles that came together to form planets, which

then swept their orbits clear of dust and gas and shepherded the remaining material into well-defined bands.

For the new TW Hydrae observations, astronomers imaged the faint radio emission from millimetre-sized dust grains in the disc, revealing details on the order of the distance between the Earth and the Sun (about 150 million kilometres). These detailed observations were made possible with ALMA 's high-resolution, long-baseline configuration. When ALMA's dishes are at their maximum separation, up to 15 kilometres apart, the telescope is able to resolve finer details. "This is the highest spatial resolution image ever of a protoplanetary disc from ALMA, and that won't be easily beaten in the future!" said Andrews [1].

"TW Hydrae is quite special. It is the nearest known protoplanetary disc to Earth and it may closely resemble the Solar System when it was only 10 million years old," adds co-author David Wilner, also with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Earlier ALMA observations of another system, HL Tauri, show that even younger protoplanetary discs -- a mere 1 million years old -- can display similar signatures of planet formation. By studying the older TW Hydrae disc, astronomers hope to better understand the evolution of our own planet and the prospects for similar systems throughout the Milky Way.

The astronomers now want to find out how common these kinds of features are in discs around other young stars and how they might change with time or environment.

Source: EurekAlert Return to Contents

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The Night Sky Friday, April 1

• Spring is here! Which means Arcturus shines brightly in the east, though still not high. The Big Dipper, high in the northeast, points its curving handle to the lower right down toward it. Jupiter shines very high far to Arcturus's upper right.

Arcturus forms the pointy end of a long, narrow kite pattern formed by the brightest stars of Bootes, the Cowherd. The kite is currently lying on its side to Arcturus's left. The head of the kite, at the far left, is bent slightly upward. The kite is 23° long, about two fist-widths at arm's length.

• This evening, telescope users along a narrow path from the Seattle/Vancouver area to Arkansas can watch for a 9.5-magnitude star (located 10° northwest of the Pleiades) to disappear for up to 9 seconds behind the invisibly faint asteroid 2892 Filipenko. Track map and finder charts for the shadow path across the US, the star to be occulted, and times.

Saturday, April 2

• This is the time of year when Arcturus shines just as high in the east as Sirius, the brighter Winter Star, shines in the southwest (as seen from mid-northern latitudes).

Sunday, April 3

• Draw a line from Castor through Pollux and follow it farther out by a big 26° (about 2½ fist-widths at arm's length). You're at the dim head of Hydra, the Sea Serpent. In a dark sky it's a subtle but distinctive asterism about the size of your thumb at arm's length. Through light pollution, binoculars show it easily.

Monday, April 4

• Double shadow transit on Jupiter for telescope users in central and western North America. From 2:37 to 3:19 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, both Io and Europa cast their shadows onto the planet.

Tuesday, April 5

• The huge, bright Winter Hexagon is still in good view at nightfall, filling the sky to the southwest and west. Start with brilliant Sirius in the southwest, the Hexagon's lower left corner. High above Sirius is Procyon. From there look even higher for Pollux and Castor, lower right from Castor to Menkalinen and bright Capella, lower left to Aldebaran, lower left to Rigel at the bottom of Orion, and back to Sirius.

Source: Sky & Telescope Return to Contents

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ISS Sighting Opportunities

For Denver: Date Visible Max Height Appears Disappears Fri Apr 1, 8:19 PM 6 min 67° 10° above WSW 10° above NE Fri Apr 1, 9:58 PM < 1 min 14° 14° above NW 14° above NNW Sat Apr 2, 9:06 PM 3 min 20° 20° above NW 11° above NNE Sun Apr 3, 8:14 PM 3 min 31° 30° above NW 11° above NE Sun Apr 3, 9:50 PM 1 min 11° 10° above NNW 11° above N Mon Apr 4, 8:58 PM 2 min 14° 13° above NNW 10° above NNE Tue Apr 5, 8:05 PM 3 min 18° 18° above NNW 10° above NNE Tue Apr 5, 9:43 PM < 1 min 10° 10° above N 10° above N

Sighting information for other cities can be found at NASA’s Satellite Sighting Information NASA-TV Highlights (all times Eastern Daylight Time)

1 p.m., Saturday, April 2 - Coverage of the Docking of the ISS Progress 63 Cargo Craft to the ISS (Docking scheduled at 2 p.m. ET) (Starts at 1:15 p.m.) (all channels) 2 p.m., Monday, April 4 - NASA TV Presents “Earth Expeditions” Episode 1 - This Year NASA Takes You on a Six-Month World Tour with Major New Field Research Campaigns to Study Regions of Critical Change from the Land, Sea and… Air (all channels) 3:30 p.m., Monday, April 4 - NASA TV Presents “Earth Expeditions” Episode 1 - This Year NASA Takes You on a Six-Month World Tour with Major New Field Research Campaigns to Study Regions of Critical Change from the Land, Sea and… Air (all channels) 7:30 p.m., Monday, April 4 - NASA TV Presents “Earth Expeditions” Episode 1 - This Year NASA Takes You on a Six-Month World Tour with Major New Field Research Campaigns to Study Regions of Critical Change from the Land, Sea and… Air (all channels) 10 p.m., Monday, April 4 - NASA TV Presents “Earth Expeditions” Episode 1 - This Year NASA Takes You on a Six-Month World Tour with Major New Field Research Campaigns to Study Regions of Critical Change from the Land, Sea and… Air (all channels) 11:30 p.m., Monday, April 4 - NASA TV Presents “Earth Expeditions” Episode 1 - This Year NASA Takes You on a Six-Month World Tour with Major New Field Research Campaigns to Study Regions of Critical Change from the Land, Sea and… Air (all channels)

Watch NASA TV on the Net by going to the NASA website. Return to Contents

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Space Calendar • Apr 01 - Cassini, Orbital Trim Maneuver #445 (OTM-445) • Apr 01 - Comet 233P/La Sagra Closest Approach To Earth (1.762 AU) • Apr 01 - Comet 110P/Hartley Closest Approach To Earth (2.567 AU) • Apr 01 - Asteroid 3 Juno Occults TYC 4991-00651-1 (11.9 Magnitude Star) • Apr 01 - Asteroid 1159 Granada Closest Approach To Earth (1.429 AU) • Apr 01 - Asteroid 7495 Feynman Closest Approach To Earth (1.520 AU) • Apr 01 - Asteroid 39566 Carllewis Closest Approach To Earth (1.769 AU) • Apr 01 - Asteroid 14702 Benclark Closest Approach To Earth (2.111 AU) • Apr 01-03 - [Mar 31] Contact 2016 Conference, Sunnyvale, California • Apr 02 - Comet 100P/Hartley Perihelion (2.011 AU) • Apr 02 - Comet 106P/Schuster At Opposition (3.716 AU) • Apr 02 - Comet 84P/Giclas At Opposition (4.249 AU) • Apr 02 - [Mar 31] Apollo Asteroid 2016 FV7 Near-Earth Flyby (0.056 AU) • Apr 02 - Asteroid 18458 Caesar Closest Approach To Earth (1.003 AU) • Apr 02 - Asteroid 2046 Leningrad Closest Approach To Earth (2.706 AU) • Apr 02 - 80th Anniversary (1936), Yurtuk Meteorite Fall (Hit House in Ukraine) • Apr 02 - Clement Ader's 175th Birthday (1841) • Apr 03 - Comet 333P/LINEAR Perihelion (1.116 AU) • Apr 03 - Comet P/2009 Q4 (Boattini) Closest Approach To Earth (2.071 AU) • Apr 03 - [Mar 31] Apollo Asteroid 2016 FX7 Near-E arth Flyby (0.026 AU) • Apr 03 - Aten Asteroid 2008 FX6 Near-Earth Flyby (0.070 AU) • Apr 03 - Asteroid 13609 Lewicki Closest Approach To Earth (1.600 AU) • Apr 03 - Gus Grissom's 90th Birthday (1926) • Apr 03 - Hermann Vogel's 175th Birthday (1841)

• Apr 04 - [Mar 29] Cassini, Titan Flyby • Apr 04 - Asteroid 5748 Davebrin Closest Approach To Earth (1.698 AU) • Apr 04 - Asteroid 886 Washingtonia Closest Approach To Earth (3.035 AU) • Apr 05 - Comet P/2003 T12 (SOHO) Closest Approach To Earth (1.347 AU) • Apr 05 - Comet P/2015 B4 (Lemmon-PANSTARRS) At Opposition (3.606 AU) • Apr 05 - Comet C/2015 B1 (PANSTARRS) Closest Approach To Earth (5.044 AU) • Apr 05 - Asteroid 29470 Higgs Closest Approach To Earth (1.413 AU) • Apr 05 - Kuiper Belt Object 2014 FT71 At Opposition (46.874 AU) •

Source: JPL Space Calendar Return to Contents

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Food for Thought

BEAM Inflatable Habitat to Launch to Space Station Next Week

An inflatable room that will be attached to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled to launch toward the orbiting laboratory next week.

The room, known as Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), was built by Bigelow Aerospace, a private company that has built other expandable space habitats in the past and has plans to continue to do so. BEAM will be the first such room to be tested on the ISS, and the first to be (briefly) occupied by astronauts.

BEAM will not be a fully functional addition to the space station. However, astronauts will enter it for a few hours at a time — about four times a year for two years, Bigelow representatives said in a NASA media teleconference yesterday (March 28). However, sensors inside BEAM will allow Bigelow engineers to test its durability against radiation and debris and make sure it meets safety standards set by NASA for any habitat that will house astronauts. [Inflatable Space Stations of Bigelow Aerospace (Infographic)]

Inflatable habitats like BEAM offer the possibility to build large habitats on the ground and send them to space in much smaller payload fairings. When fully inflated, BEAM provides a total of 565 cubic feet (16 cubic meters) of livable space. It expands to more than five times its compressed size of 105.9 cubic feet (3 cubic m).

The key challenge in building flexible or collapsible space habitats is that they also must be able to protect astronauts from space radiation, as well as withstand a collision with a piece of space debris or a micrometeoroid.

Lisa Kauke, BEAM deputy program manager at Bigelow Aerospace, said during yesterday's teleconference that BEAM meets the requirements set for the rest of the space station for withstanding those threats. She said she

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could not expand on exactly what BEAM is made of, because that information is proprietary. However, she did note that BEAM consists of a "soft goods, expandable material." It also includes a load-bearing structure made from something similar to Vectran, a manufactured fiber made from a liquid crystal polymer used in some space suits. Kauke said the BEAM material has been shown to "perform up to the standards of the ISS." BEAM is also covered by a Micrometeoroid and Orbital Debris Protection layer, which is also proprietary to Bigelow, Kauke said.

In the 2000s, Bigelow launched the Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 inflatable space habitats, both of which were put into orbit successfully but never carried humans. The company also is testing multiple habitats on Earth. Kauke said there is "not much more" that Bigelow needs to test with regard to its inflatable habitat technology before making them fully accessible to human space travelers.

"As a company, we're really comfortable with the technology," Kauke said. "We certainly demonstrated successfully that these modules can hold their pressure on orbit. We demonstrated our materials and processes."

Rajib Dasgupta, NASA project and technical integration manager for BEAM, said that from NASA's perspective, the structural safety requirements are higher for a human-rated module than for a non-human-rated one, so BEAM will have to demonstrate that it can perform at that level.

"The BEAM program is our company's next logical step in development, and it serves as our pathfinding to building manned spacecraft for the future," Kauke said. "By attaching BEAM to the ISS, we'll be able to evaluate our technology, elevate its technology readiness level and demonstrate that we are ready to support humans in space."

BEAM will launch to the station atop a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule on Friday, April 8, at 4:43 p.m. EDT (2043 GMT). The inflatable module makes up about 3,100 lbs. (1,400 kilograms) of the 4,400-lb. (2,000 kg) payload carried by the Dragon capsule.

Upon arrival at the space station, the ISS' robotic arm will remove BEAM from the Dragon capsule's "trunk" — a procedure controlled remoted from the ground. The arm will then attach BEAM to Tranquility Node of the station. Astronauts on board will be responsible for inflating the module, which Dasguptasaid should take only about 45 minutes.

Astronauts also will be responsible for installing a series of sensors that will test BEAM's resistance to radiation and debris. After a minimum two year test period, BEAM will be jettisoned from the station and will burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Source: Space.com Return to Contents

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Space Image of the Week

HERSCHEL REVEALS A RIBBON OF FUTURE STARS

Credit: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/M. Juvela (U. Helsinki, Finland) Star formation is taking place all around us. The Milky Way is laced with clouds of dust and gas that could become the nursery of the next generation of stars. Thanks to ESA’s Herschel space observatory, we can now look inside these clouds and see what is truly going on. It may seem ironic but when searching for sites of future star formation, astronomers look for the coldest spots in the Milky Way. This is because before the stars ignite the gas that will form their bulk must collapse together. To do that, it has to be cold and sluggish, so that it cannot resist gravity. As well as gas, there is also dust. This too is extremely cold, perhaps just 10–20 degrees above absolute zero. To optical telescopes it appears completely dark, but the dust reveals itselfat far-infrared wavelengths. One of the surprises is that the coldest parts of the cloud form filaments that stretch across the warmer parts of the cloud. This image shows a cold cloud filament, known to astronomers as G82.65-2.00. The blue filament is the coldest part of the cloud and contains 800 times as much mass as the Sun. The dust in this filament has a temperature of –259ºC. At this low temperature, if the filament contains enough mass it is likely that this section will collapse into stars. This image is colour-coded so that the longest infrared wavelength, corresponding to the coldest region, is shown in blue, and the shortest wavelength, corresponding to slightly warmer dust, is shown in red. The field of view on display here is a little more than two times the width of the full Moon. It is one of 116 regions of space observed by Herschel as part of the Galactic Cold Cores project. Each field was chosen because ESA’s cosmic microwave background mapper, Planck, showed that these regions of the galaxy possessed extremely cold dust. Source: SpaceRef Return to Contents