Physics Buzz

On April 23rd, NASA InSight scientists announced they had detected a small seismic event on Mars, aptly referred to as a marsquake. This event, the first of its kind ever detected, promises to bring revolutionary insights about planetary interiors and seismic activity on other worlds.

A new voyage is hopefully setting sail tonight; one that could lead to the discovery of many new worlds, some of which may even harbor life. Guided by the moon and pointed toward the stars, the goal of TESS —the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite—is to identify rocky planets around nearby stars by detecting and analyzing distinctive dips in starlight.

Knowing more about how a metal tube crumples might improve the design of everything from beer cans to space rockets. Now scientists find that poking such cylinders in the side could help predict when they might buckle from weights or pressure from above.

The same sun that shines on bright, cheery days is also responsible for the biggest explosions in the solar system. These explosions, called solar flares , can detonate with the energy of more than one billion megaton bombs and spew dangerous radiation and high-energy particles into space.

In 2014, NASA announced the CubeQuest Challenge : a contest for homegrown teams to build their own small satellites— cubesats —and compete against each other by demonstrating technological feats. Five million dollars in prize money will be divided among teams who can get into orbit around the moon, maintain a stable orbit for a long time, or make it almost all the way to Mars’ orbit while still communicating with Earth.

Earth’s surface gravity is about 9.81 m/s 2 -- a value familiar to any high school physics student asked to calculate the trajectory of a baseball -- but in reality, that number is an average, lumping together slight variations around the globe. Just as mass isn’t distributed evenly worldwide, gravity isn’t the same everywhere either, and it’s not even constant over time. As the solid earth responds to changing loads and tectonic forces, and as water mass moves around the surface and subsurface, the gravity field adjusts as well, and these changes can be detected. Image:NASA

For the past eight years NASA's MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft has been sending back gigabytes of images and data from the Sun's closest companion, Mercury. Today this will come to a fiery end when the fuel-depleted spacecraft crashes into the surface of Mercury in a planned end to the highly-successful mission. Craters on Mercury colored by the type of material. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington The resulting crater, estimated to be about 50 feet wide, will join the countless other craters that MESSENGER has imaged in great detail. The data from MESSENGER has revealed many surprises over the years including ice in the shadowy craters at Mercury's south pole , a misaligned magnetic field compared to the spin axis of Mercury , an excess of volatile elements like potassium and sulfur that shed light on how Mercury may have formed , and unusual "h

Would an all-female crew make sense on a deep space journey to Mars? Would the spacecraft rotate to simulate gravity? What's being done now to prepare for such a journey? These were some of the questions addressed last Thursday by a panel of space scientists, writers, and engineers gathered in downtown DC to talk about the challenges of going to Mars. The discussion, called Giant Leap: The Race to Mars and Back , was organized by Future Tense , a collaboration between Slate magazine, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy  moderated the first discussion and jumped straight in by asking what it is we need to do to get to Mars.

Last Thursday I reported on the launch of a new quad of NASA satellites , called the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) , which are designed to measure the dynamics of the Earth's magnetic field and a poorly-understood process called magnetic reconnection . I was able to witness the launch live from a few miles south of the launch pad and today bring you some of the sights, the sounds, and even a little bit of the physics of that experience. NASA's MMS spacecraft launches on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida on March 12th, 2015 at 10:44 PM EST. Credit: NASA via flickr

This evening at 10:44 PM EST, NASA will launch the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. This is a group of four satellites which will fly in tetrahedron formation, measuring the magnetic field around the Earth and looking for occasional "magnetic explosions" called magnetic reconnections. I'll be attending the launch and reporting back next Tuesday with images and video. For now, keep reading to find out more about the key science this quad satellites hopes to complete while in orbit and tune in to  NASA TV tonight to watch the launch live .

Earth's magnetic field, which is generated by convection currents in the highly-conductive liquid outer core, has been documenting our planet’s past for billions of years. Just like that of a standard bar magnet, our magnetic field behaves, on average, like an axial dipole: it has a north pole and a south pole and the field lines connecting them follow a characteristic geometry. Thanks to certain magnetic minerals that are incorporated into rocks as they form, the orientation of this magnetic field is written into the rock record. On this week's podcast , we take a look at paleomagnetism to understand these magnetic signatures and what they can tell us about the past. A view of the Aurora Borealis as seen from Iceland. Image Credit and Copyright: Moyan Brenn

The Orion spacecraft atop a Delta IV rocket waits at the Kennedy Space Center for Thursday's launch. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett NASA's brand-new human spacecraft, Orion , launches this Thursday December 4th for its first test flight. The launch window opens at 7:05 a.m. EST so if you are based in the U.S., be sure to set an early alarm to watch it live . The unmanned mission will last four and a half hours as Orion orbits twice around the Earth before splashing down off the coast of Baja California. During this flight, Orion will travel farther than any human spacecraft has in more than 40 years — 15 times higher than the International Space Station. In the future, Orion plans to carry four astronauts on extended, deep space missions, eventually reaching the asteroid belt and Mars. Credit: NASA Following a rough month in which an  unmanned Orbital Sciences Antares rocket exploded  on the launch pad and a pilot was killed in the  crash of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo

Originally published: Nov 13 2014 - 2:00pm, Inside Science News Service By: Charles Q. Choi, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- An ancient meteorite has now yielded the first physical evidence that intense magnetic fields played a major role in the birth of our solar system. Shortly after the sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago, a rotating disk of gas and dust that surrounded the newborn star coalesced into the planets that children now memorize. Astronomers peering at young distant stars find these protoplanetary disks usually disappear relatively quickly, in 5 million years or less. Most of the solar system's protoplanetary disk spiraled into the sun, leaving the star with 99 percent of the solar system's mass. However, it was a mystery how all this material could have swirled into the sun as fast as it apparently did. A number of theories for how this might have occurred involve magnetic fields. "Magnetic fields can introduce viscosity into the disk, essent

Originally published: Oct 20 2014 - 4:15pm, Inside Science News Service By: Ker Than, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- Life in the universe could be much older than previously thought, forming as early as fifteen million years after the Big Bang, according to a provocative new idea proposed by a Harvard astrophysicist. In this scenario for the early universe, rocky planets born from the dregs of massive, primordial stars would have been warmed by the heat of a radiation that permeated all of space, which was much hotter back then than it is now. One of these ancient worlds could have supported liquid water on its surface irrespective of its distance to a star, and thus been habitable to primitive forms of Earth-like organisms, said Avi Loeb , who chairs the Harvard astronomy department. With the discovery of exoplanets, Loeb said, scientists are beginning to seriously consider that life-as-we-know-it exists in other places. "What I’m saying here is that it can also be

Simulated Martian soil supports plant life, but questions about extraterrestrial plant growth remain. Originally published: Sep 11 2014 - 2:45pm, Inside Science News Service By: Patricia Waldron, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- Any explorers visiting Mars and the moon will have to boldly grow where no man has grown before. Setting up lunar or Martian colonies will require that explorers raise their own food. New research finds that simulated Martian soil supported plant life better than both simulated moon soil and low-quality soil from Earth. But many problems must be solved before astronauts can pick their first extraterrestrial eggplant. The study appears in the journal PLOS ONE . "Research like this is needed to fine-tune future plans for growing plants on Mars, which I think is going to be a very useful thing if we want to have colonization or even a shorter-term stay on Mars," said John Kiss, a plant biologist at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, who did

At a little past 7:30, just as the light of the day was beginning to fade, I walked up to the tables outside the Newseum in Washington, DC. House music thumped from inside the tents erected around the door, and through their sides, billowing in the hot humid wind, I could see about a hundred people in suits and dresses, champagne in hand. It was the unveiling of the Dragon V2, SpaceX's new 2-in-1 landing and escape pod. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft (first version) grappled by a robotic arm on the International Space Station. The Dragon Version 2 prototype was on public display in Washington, DC earlier this week. Image Credit: NASA/ISS "Hi, I think I'm on the list — I should have just been added." I said to the man at the table, trying to mask my nerves and the flush in my face. I had practically sprinted there in full suit and tie. "Name?" I gave it, mentioning that I had just run into my friend an hour ago and been invited along. This was a

Right now, the International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) spacecraft, which was launched in 1978, is floating in deep space. Its fate will depend on the success of a recent crowdfunding project called “ ISEE-3 Reboot Project ”. If the project can raise $125,000 by the end of March, then there’s a chance that scientists will be able to revive the spacecraft and send it on a trajectory that will bring it into orbit around Earth where it can begin collecting data, again. So far, the project has collected about $36,000. The big question is whether the project is worth the price, or not. The cost of $125,000 is certainly cheaper than starting from scratch on Earth and then launching it into space. On average, to launch a satellite costs $27,000 per kilogram . ISEE-3 weighs 390 kilograms. In order to revive the spacecraft, scientists say they need to develop software that can communicate with the satellite. This is because NASA decommissioned the satellite’s communications equipment

Stars have been exploding for billions of years, and some of those explosions are so massive that we can see them with the naked eye here on earth. Novae and supernovae (novae's more explosive older sibling), are the result of runaway nuclear fusion at the heart of white dwarf stars, and their brightness often outshines entire galaxies. Despite their size and brightness, supernovae are relatively rare — especially those bright enough to be seen with the naked eye — and they often fade within weeks or months. Records of supernovae visible to the naked eye crop up roughly every 250 years, and several cultures with written histories have recorded the dozen or so such events over the past 2,000 years. The Crab Nebula, a remnant from a supernova that occurred in the year 1054. Image Credit: NASA/ESA But some supernovae are only visible in the southern hemisphere, where many cultures have passed down oral traditions instead of written histories. Consequently, there may be eviden

Exoplanets that are most likely to host life have eluded detection, until now. As far as we understand, the most likely place to find extraterrestrial life outside of our solar system is on a planet that is similar in size to Earth and located within the habitable zone of its host star where temperatures are just right for the abundance of liquid water. Comparison of Earth and Kepler 186f. To the right you can see the orbit of Kepler 186f compared to the other four exoplanets in the system that orbit closer to the star. Credit:  NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech Today, a group of scientists announced that with Kepler they have discovered the very first Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone. Before now, scientists have observed Earth-sized exoplanets that were too close to their host star and therefore too hot for liquid water. Scientists have also observed a healthy amount of planets within their habitable zone, but the planets are too large to likely contain a rocky surface

If you're living in North or South America, look toward the sky tonight for a total lunar eclipse. Beginning around 2 AM Eastern Time tonight (technically April 15th), the moon will pass into the Earth's shadow, and the eclipse will peak between 3 and 4 AM Eastern Time. Lunar eclipses (varying from total eclipses to barely noticeable ones) are fairly common — typically two to three occur each year. Tonight's eclipse, however, is just the beginning. After tonight, three subsequent lunar eclipses will all be total eclipses as well, each separated by about six month intervals. This "tetrad" of lunar eclipses occurs infrequently; in fact, only about 16 percent of lunar eclipses ever belong to a tetrad such as the one beginning tonight. A lunar eclipse from 2007 captured by Jens Hackman of Weikersheim, Germany. Image Credit: Jens Hackman/NASA