Seven minutes of harrowing descent to the Red Planet will occur on February 18th when NASA’s Perseverance rover — a robotic “scientist” weighing 2,260 pounds–will parachute through the tenuous Martian air, marking a new era in red planet exploration. Once at the top of the Red Planet’s atmosphere, a science-fiction movie descent begins as it drops through temperatures equivalent to the surface of the Sun, along with a supersonic parachute inflation, and the first ever autonomous guided landing on Mars delivering the biggest, heaviest, cleanest, and most sophisticated six-wheeled robotic geologist ever launched into space north of the Martian equator.
In the distant future, a billion miles from Earth, like a 21st-Century version of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a robotic, motor-less NASA submarine facsimile of Verne’s Nautilus, will probe the depths of Kraken Mare, the largest lake on Saturn’s, Earthlike moon, Titan, shrouded in a golden haze of gaseous nitrogen. This immense 1000-foot-deep body of methane is nearly the size of all five Great Lakes combined.
In a half-second flash of light in May of this year, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected the most powerful explosion since the Big Bang –the brightest infrared light from a short gamma-ray burst ever seen with a bizarre glow that is more luminous than previously thought was possible, unleashing more energy in a blink of an eye than the Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. This near-infrared emission was 10 times brighter than predicted, defying conventional models.
“One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it – in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them – that’s huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us,” says physicist, Michio Kaku, author of The Future of Humanity.
The famed astrophysicist, Lord Martin Rees, suggests that gas giant Jupiter’s dense, terrifying atmosphere –with its constant storms with thunderheads reaching 40 miles from base to top — five times taller than those on Earth, and powerful lightning flashes up to three times more powerful than Earth’s largest “superbolts”– may be inhabited in the upper regions above by floating balloon-like creatures.
Ever since Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past Jupiter in March, 1979 (where a day lasts 10 hours), NASA scientists have been captivated by the mysteries that have been unveiled. A new study argues that the four largest moons of the largest planet in the solar system –three of them harboring oceans believed to 100 kilometers deep or more–may have a bigger influence on each other’s tides than the gas giant itself does. The findings suggest that oceans on these moons could then generate more heat from friction and could be more suitable to hosting life than previously thought.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
