6 Best space photos that Shocked the world in 2022 - HT Tech

Home Photos 6 Best space photos that Shocked the world in 2022

6 Best space photos that Shocked the world in 2022

By: HT TECH
| Updated on: Dec 24 2022, 18:22 IST

With plenty of space missions taking place in 2022, one of the images that stands out from the rest was this picture of the Moon above the horizon of the Earth taken from the the International Space Station some 408 km up in the sky.  (NASA)

1/6 With plenty of space missions taking place in 2022, one of the images that stands out from the rest was this picture of the Moon above the horizon of the Earth taken from the the International Space Station some 408 km up in the sky.  (NASA)

The NASA Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, is equipped with a visible-light camera called JunoCam. It took this spectacular image of the giant planet as Ganymede,  one of Jupiter's four largest moons, cast a shadow on the planet. (NASA Juno)

2/6 The NASA Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, is equipped with a visible-light camera called JunoCam. It took this spectacular image of the giant planet as Ganymede,  one of Jupiter's four largest moons, cast a shadow on the planet. (NASA Juno)

The NASA Solar Orbiter was also not behind in action as it captured never-seen-before details in the Sun’s atmosphere. The image was taken in extreme ultraviolet spectrum to highlight the solar activity.   (NASA Solar Orbiter)

3/6 The NASA Solar Orbiter was also not behind in action as it captured never-seen-before details in the Sun’s atmosphere. The image was taken in extreme ultraviolet spectrum to highlight the solar activity.   (NASA Solar Orbiter)

On April 24, the recently retired NASA InSight lander took its last selfie. This image has now become iconic given the love from netizens the NASA lander has received.   (NASA)

4/6 On April 24, the recently retired NASA InSight lander took its last selfie. This image has now become iconic given the love from netizens the NASA lander has received.   (NASA)

Another image from NASA’s Mars exploration is the debris from the gear that helped land the Perseverance rover on Mars. The image was taken by the space helicopter, Ingenuity.  (NASA Ingenuity)

5/6 Another image from NASA’s Mars exploration is the debris from the gear that helped land the Perseverance rover on Mars. The image was taken by the space helicopter, Ingenuity.  (NASA Ingenuity)

This image was taken just moments before NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft struck the Dimorphos asteroid, marking the moment when for the first time, humanity would physically move a celestial object. (Reuters)

6/6 This image was taken just moments before NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft struck the Dimorphos asteroid, marking the moment when for the first time, humanity would physically move a celestial object. (Reuters)

First Published Date: 24 Dec, 15:12 IST

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NASA Explores a Winter Wonderland on Mars – Otherworldly Holiday Scene With Cube-Shaped Snow - SciTechDaily

Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planet’s coldest season.

When winter comes to Mars, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly holiday scene. Snow, ice, and frost accompany the season’s sub-zero temperatures. Some of the coldest of these occur at the planet’s poles, where it gets as low as minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).

The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured these images of sand dunes covered by frost just after winter solstice. The frost here is a mixture of carbon dioxide (dry) ice and water ice and will disappear in a few months when spring arrives. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Cold as it is, don’t expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planet’s elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years.

Snow falls and ice and frost form on Mars, too. NASA’s spacecraft on and orbiting the Red Planet reveal the similarities to and differences from how we experience winter on Earth. Mars scientist Sylvain Piqueux of JPL explains in this video. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Still, the planet offers unique winter phenomena that scientists have been able to study, thanks to NASA’s robotic Mars explorers. Here are a few of the things they’ve discovered:

Two Kinds of Snow

Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.

“Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. “If you were looking for skiing, though, you’d have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.”

HiRISE captured these “megadunes,” also called barchans. Carbon dioxide frost and ice have formed over the dunes during the winter; as this starts to sublimate during spring, the darker-colored dune sand is revealed. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

How We Know It Snows

Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can’t see through those clouds, and surface missions can’t survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars’ north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.

NASA scientists can measure the size and shape distribution of snow particles, layer by layer, in a storm. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission is an international satellite project that provides next-generation observations of rain and snow worldwide every three hours. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Ryan Fitzgibbons

Cubic Snowflakes

Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal’s shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.

“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped,” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”

The HiRISE camera captured this image of the edge of a crater in the middle of winter. The south-facing slope of the crater, which receives less sunlight, has formed patchy, bright frost, seen in blue in this enhanced-color image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Jack Frost Nipping at Your Rover

Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASA’s Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning Sun.

HiRISE captured this spring scene, when water ice frozen in the soil had split the ground into polygons. Translucent carbon dioxide ice allows sunlight to shine through and heat gases that escape through vents, releasing fans of darker material onto the surface (shown as blue in this enhanced-color image). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Winter’s Wondrous End

Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to “thaw” and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.

This “thawing” also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.

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Rescue Soyuz spacecraft could reach space station in February - Space.com

It will be a while before backup comes for a space station crew currently depending on a leaky Soyuz to get home.

Should the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft be deemed unsafe after spouting coolant into space Dec. 14, two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut will need to wait until February for a backup Soyuz to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS), a Russian space official said during a press conference Thursday (Dec. 22).

"Our next crew ... was scheduled to fly in the middle of March," said Sergei Krikalev, head of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow, during the livestreamed NASA press conference.

The new Soyuz on the ground planned for that crew could instead be launched empty to retrieve the three ISS crew members if they are indeed stranded. But Krikalev said it can only be "sent up a little earlier ... about two, three weeks earlier is at the maximum what we can do at this point."

In photos: International Space Station at 20

The cause of the hole that caused the leak is still under investigation, but one idea has been ruled out: it was not part of the ongoing Geminid meteor shower, as the trajectory was in the wrong direction, Joel Montalbano, NASA's ISS program manager, said during the same briefing.

On Sunday (Dec. 18), NASA worked with cameras on the station's Canadarm2 robotic arm. The survey found a small hole in the MS-22 that is the likely cause of the leak, but how the hole came to be isn't yet known.

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"We got some work to do with imagery to better understand if it was a meteoroid hit or if there was a hardware issue, and that work is in front of us," Montalbano said. Another possibility is a piece of space junk, but Krikalev said such an object would be too small to track from the ground as the hole was only 0.8 millimeters wide.

If Russia indeed fast-tracks the next Soyuz to the space station, the damaged MS-22 would come back empty. "Roscosmos would plan to return the current Soyuz on orbit and collect the data so they can use that for future evaluations," Montalbano said.

Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of "Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).

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Scientists reveal secrets of glass frogs that HIDE their red blood cells - Daily Mail

Russia considers ways to return space crew after capsule leak - Al Jazeera English

Tests are being conducted to determine whether the Soyuz MS-22 capsule is unfit for crewed flight after coolant leak.

Russia’s space agency is considering a “rescue” plan to bring home three crew members ahead of schedule from the International Space Station (ISS) after their Soyuz capsule sprang a coolant leak.

Roscosmos and NASA officials said at a news conference on Thursday that they are continuing to investigate how the coolant line of the capsule’s external radiator sustained a tiny puncture last week, just as two cosmonauts were preparing for a routine spacewalk.

No final decision has been made about the precise means by which the three Russian crew members will return to Earth – whether by launching another empty Soyuz to retrieve them or by the seemingly less likely option of sending them home in the leaky capsule without most of its coolant.

Sergei Krikalev, who leads human spaceflight programs at Russia’s Roscosmos, told reporters the damage was being assessed.

LIVE: Listen as we discuss the ongoing investigation of an external leak that occurred on Dec. 14 from the Soyuz spacecraft docked to the @Space_Station. https://t.co/nLniKx5igz

— NASA (@NASA) December 22, 2022

If a thermal analysis, which assesses how hot it will get inside the cabin, concludes that the Soyuz MS-22 capsule is unfit for crewed flight, then a scheduled launch of another Soyuz capsule in mid-March from Baikonur Cosmodrome could be moved up and the capsule would be sent to the ISS without crew, he said.

“They’re looking at late February to send up the next Soyuz vehicle,” added Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program manager, who was also on the call.

If this were the case, the damaged spaceship would return to Earth without a crew.

Krikalev said last week that the leak could have been caused by a micro-meteoroid strike. But he and his NASA counterparts have left open the possibility of other reasons, such as a hardware failure or an impact by a tiny piece of space debris.

The ISS said on Wednesday it had conducted a Debris Avoidance Manoeuvre – one of three such operations so far this year. The two earlier were in June and October.

At 8:42am ET, the space station conducted a Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver to provide an extra measure of distance away from the predicted track of a fragment of debris, which resulted in a postponement of the spacewalk by @NASA_Astronauts. https://t.co/sRDeALLf69

— International Space Station (@Space_Station) December 21, 2022

The leak on December 14 prompted mission controllers in Moscow to call off a spacewalk as a dramatic live NASA webcast showed what appeared to be a flurry of snowflake-like particles spewing from the rear of the Soyuz spacecraft.

The leak lasted for hours and emptied the radiator of coolant used to regulate temperatures inside the crew compartment of the spacecraft.

NASA has said that none of the ISS crew was ever in any danger from the leak.

The Russian capsule’s crew compartment is currently being vented with airflow allowed through an open hatch to the ISS. NASA has previously said the capsule’s temperatures remain “within acceptable limits” but Krikalev added that the temperature would rise rapidly if the hatch to the ISS were closed.

The ISS is a science laboratory spanning the length of a football field, orbits about 400km (250 miles) above the Earth and has been continuously occupied for 20 years.

The station is managed by a US-Russian-led partnership, which also includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries. It has remained a rare venue of cooperation between Moscow and Washington since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine and ensuing Western sanctions on Russia.

Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dimitry Petelin – who were suited up for the spacewalk at the time the leak was discovered – flew to the ISS on board the now-crippled MS-22 capsule along with US astronaut Frank Rubio in September.

Four other ISS crew members – two more from NASA, a third Russian and a Japanese cosmonaut – rode to the ISS in October via a NASA-contracted SpaceX Crew Dragon. They also remain on board, with their capsule parked at the ISS.

The leak has upended Russia’s ISS routines for the weeks ahead, forcing a suspension of all future Roscosmos spacewalks as officials in Moscow shift their focus to the leaky MS-22.

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Perseverance Left Scientists a Present on Mars, But They Can't Open It Until 2033 - ScienceAlert

In the not-too-distant future, a planetary scientist will open up a tube of rocks that came from Mars.

Thanks to the Perseverance rover, there are at least 17 of these rock and regolith samples, just waiting for analysis on Earth. To get them, the rover has covered about 13 kilometers (8 miles) on its Mars geology field trip.

The rover has been drilling and scooping since shortly after landing, squirreling away rocks and sand into special tubes for transport.

It dropped its first load near a place called "Three Forks" this week. That tube contains bits of igneous rock it found in January of this year.

It wasn't just a "drop and run". Mission engineers had to make sure the tube landed safely. So, they did it slowly. First, Perseverance pulled the container out of its belly.

Then it looked everything over with a camera before dropping the tube down 90 centimeters onto the surface.

Then another image showed mission engineers the sample was safely in position on its side for easy pickup.

Eventually, all the containers Perseverance has filled will make their way to labs on Earth. Scientists will analyze them to understand the chemical and mineral properties of the samples.

(NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

From there, they can construct a more accurate geological and atmospheric history of the Red Planet.

"Choosing the first depot on Mars makes this exploration campaign very real and tangible," said David Parker, ESA's director of Human and Robotic Exploration. "Now we have a place to revisit with samples waiting for us there."

What will we learn from the Perseverance Mars rock samples?

Mars is an enigma of a planet. Its history is complex. Volcanoes exist there. How long ago were they active?

Canyons split the landscape. What caused those tectonic actions? Craters scar the planet, digging up material from deep beneath the surface. And, places on Mars clearly show evidence of flowing liquid water. Yet, no water flows there now. It's all locked up in subsurface ice or at the poles.

So, how do we find out more about the geological history of the planet?

The most direct way is to look at rock samples. Mars has igneous rock, as well as sandstones, mudstones, and clays. And, of course, there's dust and sand nearly everywhere. All of those can tell something about the time on Mars when lava flowed, lakes and oceans existed, and when it all happened.

Detailed technical analysis of igneous rocks will tell how long ago the volcanoes were active. Chemical and mineralogical clues in Mars rocks will help planetary scientists understand if they were in contact with water. Finally, all of that information should help scientists figure out if and when Mars could have supported life.

The rock samples that Perseverance gathers come from different rock "regimes" in Jezero Crater. Orbital images show that this region was once an ancient delta that was flooded with water. It appears to be rich in clay minerals and carbonates, which form only in the presence of water.

Those same carbonates contain a record of Mars's ancient climate. Yet, here's another interesting thing about them: on Earth, living organisms can also produce carbonates.

It's not clear if those on Mars have the same life-friendly origin, but it does make Jezero Crater a tantalizing place to sample.

Establishing a rock pipeline from Mars to Earth

The sample-gathering expedition using the tubes has been part of the program from the beginning. The original idea was to have the rover gather and deliver them to the NASA Sample Return Lander (SRL).

That mission is being planned and built by NASA and the European Space Agency for launch later this decade. It should land in Jezero Crater near Perseverance to make for easy delivery of the tubes. The lander is equipped with a sample transfer arm built by ESA for the job.

Of course, scientists don't want to leave anything to chance. So, the mission also has a backup plan in case Perseverance can't deliver. Mission scientists will send a couple of small helicopters out to gather the samples.

We know that could work because the Ingenuity chopper has been cranking away in overtime, showing scientists just what a Mars chopper can do.

Once the rocks are onboard the SRL, they'll get loaded into a small rocket that will take off from the surface.

Once in space, it will deliver them to an ESA-built spacecraft orbiting Mars for eventual return to Earth. If all goes well, the rocks are expected to be in labs for more detailed study sometime in 2033.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

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Spacewalk with NASA Astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio (Dec. 22) - NASA

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