24148 Kommentare

• Kommentar-Link Samstag, 12 April 2025 11:11 gepostet von Davidhauts

  While the Cumberland sample may contain longer chains of fatty acids, SAM is not designed to detect them. But SAM’s ability to spot these larger molecules suggests it could detect similar chemical signatures of past life on Mars if they’re present, Williams said.
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  “Curiosity is not a life detection mission,” Freissinet said. “Curiosity is a habitability detection mission to know if all the conditions were right … for life to evolve. Having these results, it’s really at the edge of the capabilities of Curiosity, and it’s even maybe better than what we had expected from this mission.”
  
  Before sending missions to Mars, scientists didn’t think organic molecules would be found on the red planet because of the intensity of radiation Mars has long endured, Glavin said.
  Curiosity won’t return to Yellowknife Bay during its mission, but there are still pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample aboard. Next, the team wants to design a new experiment to see what it can detect. If the team can identify similar long-chain molecules, it would mark another step forward that might help researchers determine their origins, Freissinet said.
  
  “That’s the most precious sample we have on board … waiting for us to run the perfect experiment on it,” she said. “It holds secrets, and we need to decipher the secrets.”
  
  Briony Horgan, coinvestigator on the Perseverance rover mission and professor of planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, called the detection “a big win for the whole team.” Horgan was not involved the study.
  “This detection really confirms our hopes that sediments laid down in ancient watery environments on Mars could preserve a treasure trove of organic molecules that can tell us about everything from prebiotic processes and pathways for the origin of life, to potential biosignatures from ancient organisms,” Horgan said.
  
  Dr. Ben K.D. Pearce, assistant professor in Purdue’s department of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and leader of the Laboratory for Origins and Astrobiology Research, called the findings “arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars.” Pearce did not participate in the research.
• Kommentar-Link Samstag, 12 April 2025 10:51 gepostet von Jasonlus

  Arctic auroras
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  For getting around during winter, the Inuit here nowadays prefer snowmobiles, although they still keep their sled dogs. During winter they’ll offer intrepid visitors, wrapped up warm against the deep-freeze temperatures, dog-sledding jaunts. These can last either an hour or be part of expeditions over several days, sometimes with the added experience of learning how to build an igloo. Sisimiut on the west coast and Tasilaq in the southeast are active winter centers for dog sledding.
  
  Winter’s most stellar attraction, though, is northern lights watching. With little urban light pollution, Greenland is a dark canvas for spectacular displays, and aurora borealis-watching vacations are becoming more popular.
  
  Staying outdoors, Greenland is developing a reputation among adventure enthusiasts: from long-distance skiing expeditions and heliskiing on the icecap to hiking the 100-mile-long Arctic Circle Trail from Kangerslussuaq, where firearms need to be carried for warning shots in case of polar bear encounters.
  
  Life is definitely changing here. The climate crisis is eating away at its icecap and Greenland may well end up as a pawn in a game of geopolitical chess. But for now, the bright glare of international attention should shine a favorable light on one of the wildest travel destinations on Earth.
  
  Travel writer Mark Stratton is an Arctic specialist who has traveled to Greenland six times and counting. He’s marveled at the aurora borealis, sailed to Disko Island, dog-sledded with the Inuit, and once got stuck in an icefloe.
• Kommentar-Link Samstag, 12 April 2025 10:32 gepostet von RodgerGroob

  Remote and rugged
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  A more organic way to see this coast is by the multi-day coastal ferry, the long-running Sarfaq Ittuk, of the Arctic Umiaq Line. It’s less corporate than the modern cruise ships and travelers get to meet Inuit commuters. Greenland is pricey. Lettuce in a local community store might cost $10, but this coastal voyage won’t break the bank.
  
  The hot ticket currently for exploring Greenland’s wilder side is to head to the east coast facing Europe. It’s raw and sees far fewer tourists, with a harshly dramatic coastline of fjords where icebergs drift south. There are no roads and the scattered population of just over 3,500 people inhabit a coastline roughly the distance from New York to Denver.
  
  A growing number of small expedition vessels probe this remote coast for its frosted scenery and wildlife. Increasingly popular is the world’s largest fjord system of Scoresby Sound with its sharp-fanged mountains and hanging valleys choked by glaciers. Sailing north is the prosaically named North East Greenland National Park, fabulous for spotting wildlife on the tundra.
  
  Travelers come to see polar bears which, during the northern hemisphere’s summer, move closer to land as the sea-ice melts. There are also musk oxen, great flocks of migrating geese, Arctic foxes and walrus.
  Some of these animals are fair game for the local communities. Perhaps Greenland’s most interesting cultural visit is to a village that will take longer to learn how to pronounce than actually walk around — Ittoqqortoormiit. Five hundred miles north of its neighboring settlement, the 345 locals are frozen in for nine months of the year. Ships sail in to meet them during the brief summer melt between June and August.
  
  Locked in by ice, they’ve retained traditional habits.
  
  “My parents hunt nearly all their food,” said Mette Barselajsen, who owns Ittoqqortoormiit’s only guesthouse. “They prefer the old ways, burying it in the ground to ferment and preserve it. Just one muskox can bring 440 pounds of meat.”
• Kommentar-Link Samstag, 12 April 2025 10:05 gepostet von ChesterIgnop

  Curiosity has maintained pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample in a “doggy bag” so that the team could have the rover revisit it later, even miles away from the site where it was collected. The team developed and tested innovative methods in its lab on Earth before sending messages to the rover to try experiments on the sample.
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  In a quest to see whether amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, existed in the sample, the team instructed the rover to heat up the sample twice within SAM’s oven. When it measured the mass of the molecules released during heating, there weren’t any amino acids, but they found something entirely unexpected.
  
  An intriguing detection
  The team was surprised to detect small amounts of decane, undecane and dodecane, so it had to conduct a reverse experiment on Earth to determine whether these organic compounds were the remnants of the fatty acids undecanoic acid, dodecanoic acid and tridecanoic acid, respectively.
  
  The scientists mixed undecanoic acid into a clay similar to what exists on Mars and heated it up in a way that mimicked conditions within SAM’s oven. The undecanoic acid released decane, just like what Curiosity detected.
  
  Each fatty acid remnant detected by Curiosity was made with a long chain of 11 to 13 carbon atoms. Previous molecules detected on Mars were smaller, meaning their atomic weight was less than the molecules found in the new study, and simpler.
  “It’s notable that non-biological processes typically make shorter fatty acids, with less than 12 carbons,” said study coauthor Dr. Amy Williams, associate professor of geology at the University of Florida and assistant director of the Astraeus Space Institute, in an email. “Larger and more complex molecules are likely what are required for an origin of life, if it ever occurred on Mars.”
• Kommentar-Link Samstag, 12 April 2025 09:37 gepostet von Scottswach

  Iceberg flotillas
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  Located on the west coast, Ilulissat is a pretty halibut- and prawn-fishing port on a dark rock bay where visitors can sit in pubs sipping craft beers chill-filtered by 100,000-year-old glacial ice.
  
  It’s a place to be awed by the UNESCO World Heritage Icefjord where Manhattan skyscraper-sized icebergs disgorge from Greenland’s icecap to float like ghostly ships in the surrounding Disko Bay.
  
  Small boats take visitors out to sail closely among the bay’s magnificent iceberg flotilla. But not too close.
  
  “I was on my boat once and saw one of these icebergs split in two. The pieces fell backwards into the sea and created a giant wave,” said David Karlsen, skipper of the pleasure-boat, Katak. “…I didn’t hang around.”
  
  Disko Bay’s other giants are whales. From June to September breaching humpback whales join the likes of fin and minke whales feasting on plankton. Whale-watching is excellent all around Greenland’s craggy coastline.
  
  Whales are eaten here. Visitors shouldn’t be surprised to encounter the traditional Greenlandic delicacy of mattak — whale-skin and blubber that when tasted is akin to chewing on rubber. Inuit communities have quotas to not only hunt the likes of narwhals but also polar bears, musk-ox and caribou — which can also appear on menus.
• Kommentar-Link Freitag, 11 April 2025 22:59 gepostet von Peterhierm

  ‘A whole different mindset’
  Accurate clockwork is one matter. But how future astronauts living and working on the lunar surface will experience time is a different question entirely.
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  On Earth, our sense of one day is governed by the fact that the planet completes one rotation every 24 hours, giving most locations a consistent cycle of daylight and darkened nights. On the moon, however, the equator receives roughly 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness.
  
  “It’s just a very, very different concept” on the moon, Betts said. “And (NASA is) talking about landing astronauts in the very interesting south polar region (of the moon), where you have permanently lit and permanently shadowed areas. So, that’s a whole other set of confusion.”
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  “It’ll be challenging” for those astronauts, Betts added. “It’s so different than Earth, and it’s just a whole different mindset.”
  
  That will be true no matter what time is displayed on the astronauts’ watches.
  
  Still, precision timekeeping matters — not just for the sake of scientifically understanding the passage of time on the moon but also for setting up all the infrastructure necessary to carry out missions.
  
  The beauty of creating a time scale from scratch, Gramling said, is that scientists can take everything they have learned about timekeeping on Earth and apply it to a new system on the moon.
  
  And if scientists can get it right on the moon, she added, they can get it right later down the road if NASA fulfills its goal of sending astronauts deeper into the solar system.
  
  “We are very much looking at executing this on the moon, learning what we can learn,” Gramling said, “so that we are prepared to do the same thing on Mars or other future bodies.”
• Kommentar-Link Freitag, 11 April 2025 22:25 gepostet von Robertbrorp

  ‘A whole different mindset’
  Accurate clockwork is one matter. But how future astronauts living and working on the lunar surface will experience time is a different question entirely.
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  On Earth, our sense of one day is governed by the fact that the planet completes one rotation every 24 hours, giving most locations a consistent cycle of daylight and darkened nights. On the moon, however, the equator receives roughly 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness.
  
  “It’s just a very, very different concept” on the moon, Betts said. “And (NASA is) talking about landing astronauts in the very interesting south polar region (of the moon), where you have permanently lit and permanently shadowed areas. So, that’s a whole other set of confusion.”
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  “It’ll be challenging” for those astronauts, Betts added. “It’s so different than Earth, and it’s just a whole different mindset.”
  
  That will be true no matter what time is displayed on the astronauts’ watches.
  
  Still, precision timekeeping matters — not just for the sake of scientifically understanding the passage of time on the moon but also for setting up all the infrastructure necessary to carry out missions.
  
  The beauty of creating a time scale from scratch, Gramling said, is that scientists can take everything they have learned about timekeeping on Earth and apply it to a new system on the moon.
  
  And if scientists can get it right on the moon, she added, they can get it right later down the road if NASA fulfills its goal of sending astronauts deeper into the solar system.
  
  “We are very much looking at executing this on the moon, learning what we can learn,” Gramling said, “so that we are prepared to do the same thing on Mars or other future bodies.”
• Kommentar-Link Freitag, 11 April 2025 22:20 gepostet von Alonzotyday

  Space, time: The continual question
  If time moves differently on the peaks of mountains than the shores of the ocean, you can imagine that things get even more bizarre the farther away from Earth you travel.
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  To add more complication: Time also passes slower the faster a person or spacecraft is moving, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
  
  Astronauts on the International Space Station, for example, are lucky, said Dr. Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in a phone interview. Though the space station orbits about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, it also travels at high speeds — looping the planet 16 times per day — so the effects of relativity somewhat cancel each other out, Patla said. For that reason, astronauts on the orbiting laboratory can easily use Earth time to stay on schedule.
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  For other missions — it’s not so simple.
  
  Fortunately, scientists already have decades of experience contending with the complexities.
  
  Spacecraft, for example, are equipped with their own clocks called oscillators, Gramling said.
  
  “They maintain their own time,” Gramling said. “And most of our operations for spacecraft — even spacecraft that are all the way out at Pluto, or the Kuiper Belt, like New Horizons — (rely on) ground stations that are back on Earth. So everything they’re doing has to correlate with UTC.”
  But those spacecraft also rely on their own kept time, Gramling said. Vehicles exploring deep into the solar system, for example, have to know — based on their own time scale — when they are approaching a planet in case the spacecraft needs to use that planetary body for navigational purposes, she added.
  
  For 50 years, scientists have also been able to observe atomic clocks that are tucked aboard GPS satellites, which orbit Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers) away — or about one-nineteenth the distance between our planet and the moon.
  
  Studying those clocks has given scientists a great starting point to begin extrapolating further as they set out to establish a new time scale for the moon, Patla said.
  
  “We can easily compare (GPS) clocks to clocks on the ground,” Patla said, adding that scientists have found a way to gently slow GPS clocks down, making them tick more in-line with Earth-bound clocks. “Obviously, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s easier than making a mess.”
• Kommentar-Link Freitag, 11 April 2025 21:48 gepostet von AlonzoAmogy

  Lunar clockwork
  What scientists know for certain is that they need to get precision timekeeping instruments to the moon.
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  Exactly who pays for lunar clocks, which type of clocks will go, and where they’ll be positioned are all questions that remain up in the air, Gramling said.
  
  “We have to work all of this out,” she said. “I don’t think we know yet. I think it will be an amalgamation of several different things.”
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  Atomic clocks, Gramling noted, are great for long-term stability, and crystal oscillators have an advantage for short-term stability.
  “You never trust one clock,” Gramling added. “And you never trust two clocks.”
  
  Clocks of various types could be placed inside satellites that orbit the moon or perhaps at the precise locations on the lunar surface that astronauts will one day visit.
  
  As for price, an atomic clock worthy of space travel could cost around a few million dollars, according Gramling, with crystal oscillators coming in substantially cheaper.
  
  But, Patla said, you get what you pay for.
  
  “The very cheap oscillators may be off by milliseconds or even 10s of milliseconds,” he added. “And that is important because for navigation purposes — we need to have the clocks synchronized to 10s of nanoseconds.”
  
  A network of clocks on the moon could work in concert to inform the new lunar time scale, just as atomic clocks do for UTC on Earth.
  
  (There will not, Gramling added, be different time zones on the moon. “There have been conversations about creating different zones, with the answer: ‘No,’” she said. “But that could change in the future.”)
• Kommentar-Link Freitag, 11 April 2025 21:48 gepostet von DarnelltEk

  Space, time: The continual question
  If time moves differently on the peaks of mountains than the shores of the ocean, you can imagine that things get even more bizarre the farther away from Earth you travel.
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  To add more complication: Time also passes slower the faster a person or spacecraft is moving, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
  
  Astronauts on the International Space Station, for example, are lucky, said Dr. Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in a phone interview. Though the space station orbits about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, it also travels at high speeds — looping the planet 16 times per day — so the effects of relativity somewhat cancel each other out, Patla said. For that reason, astronauts on the orbiting laboratory can easily use Earth time to stay on schedule.
  https://kra30c.cc
  кракен вход
  For other missions — it’s not so simple.
  
  Fortunately, scientists already have decades of experience contending with the complexities.
  
  Spacecraft, for example, are equipped with their own clocks called oscillators, Gramling said.
  
  “They maintain their own time,” Gramling said. “And most of our operations for spacecraft — even spacecraft that are all the way out at Pluto, or the Kuiper Belt, like New Horizons — (rely on) ground stations that are back on Earth. So everything they’re doing has to correlate with UTC.”
  But those spacecraft also rely on their own kept time, Gramling said. Vehicles exploring deep into the solar system, for example, have to know — based on their own time scale — when they are approaching a planet in case the spacecraft needs to use that planetary body for navigational purposes, she added.
  
  For 50 years, scientists have also been able to observe atomic clocks that are tucked aboard GPS satellites, which orbit Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers) away — or about one-nineteenth the distance between our planet and the moon.
  
  Studying those clocks has given scientists a great starting point to begin extrapolating further as they set out to establish a new time scale for the moon, Patla said.
  
  “We can easily compare (GPS) clocks to clocks on the ground,” Patla said, adding that scientists have found a way to gently slow GPS clocks down, making them tick more in-line with Earth-bound clocks. “Obviously, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s easier than making a mess.”