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Ginkgo, hunting for biotech platforms that ‘collect dust,’ scoops up AAV gene therapy capsid specialist – FierceBiotech
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Atmospheric dust may have hidden true extent of global heating | Climate crisis
Dust that billows up from desert storms and arid landscapes has helped cool the planet for the past several decades, and its presence in the atmosphere may have obscured the true extent of global heating caused by fossil fuel emissions.
Atmospheric dust has increased by about 55% since the mid-1800s, an analysis suggests. And that increasing dust may have hidden up to 8% of warming from carbon emissions.
The analysis by atmospheric scientists and climate researchers in the US and Europe attempts to tally the varied, complex ways in which dust has affected global climate patterns, concluding that overall, it has worked to somewhat counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gasses. The study, published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, warns that current climate models fail to take into account the effect of atmospheric dust.
“We’ve been predicting for a long time that we’re headed toward a bad place when it comes to greenhouse warming,” said Jasper Kok, an atmospheric physicist at UCLA who led the research. “What this research shows is that so far, we’ve had the emergency brake on.”
About 26m tons of dust are suspended in our atmosphere, scientists estimate. Its effects are complicated.
Dust, along with synthetic particulate pollution, can cool the planet in several ways. These mineral particles can reflect sunlight away from the Earth and dissipate cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere that warm the planet. Dust that falls into the ocean encourages the growth of phytoplankton – microscopic plants in the ocean – that absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
Dust can also have a warming effect in some cases – darkening snow and ice, and prompting them to absorb more heat.
But after they tallied everything up, it seemed clear to researchers that the dust had an overall cooling effect.
“There are all these different factors that play into the role of mineral dusts in our atmosphere,” said Gisela Winckler, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. “This is the first review of its kind to really bring all these different aspects together.”
Although climate models have so far been able to predict global heating with quite a bit of accuracy, Winckler said the review made clear that these predictions haven’t been able to pin down the role of dust especially well.
Limited records from ice cores, marine sediment records, and other sources suggest that dust overall had also been increasing since pre-industrial times – in part due to development, agriculture, and other human impacts on landscapes. But the amount of dust also seems to have been decreasing since the 1980s.
More data and research is needed to better understand these dust patterns, Winckler said, and better predict how they will change in coming years.
But if dust in the atmosphere is decreasing, the warming effects of greenhouse gases could speed up.
“We could start to experience faster and faster warming because of this,” Kok said. “And maybe we’re waking up to that reality too late.”
Atmospheric dust may have hidden true extent of global heating | Climate crisis
Dust that billows up from desert storms and arid landscapes has helped cool the planet for the past several decades, and its presence in the atmosphere may have obscured the true extent of global heating caused by fossil fuel emissions.
Atmospheric dust has increased by about 55% since the mid-1800s, an analysis suggests. And that increasing dust may have hidden up to 8% of warming from carbon emissions.
The analysis by atmospheric scientists and climate researchers in the US and Europe attempts to tally the varied, complex ways in which dust has affected global climate patterns, concluding that overall, it has worked to somewhat counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gasses. The study, published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, warns that current climate models fail to take into account the effect of atmospheric dust.
“We’ve been predicting for a long time that we’re headed toward a bad place when it comes to greenhouse warming,” said Jasper Kok, an atmospheric physicist at UCLA who led the research. “What this research shows is that so far, we’ve had the emergency brake on.”
About 26m tons of dust are suspended in our atmosphere, scientists estimate. Its effects are complicated.
Dust, along with synthetic particulate pollution, can cool the planet in several ways. These mineral particles can reflect sunlight away from the Earth and dissipate cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere that warm the planet. Dust that falls into the ocean encourages the growth of phytoplankton – microscopic plants in the ocean – that absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
Dust can also have a warming effect in some cases – darkening snow and ice, and prompting them to absorb more heat.
But after they tallied everything up, it seemed clear to researchers that the dust had an overall cooling effect.
“There are all these different factors that play into the role of mineral dusts in our atmosphere,” said Gisela Winckler, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. “This is the first review of its kind to really bring all these different aspects together.”
Although climate models have so far been able to predict global heating with quite a bit of accuracy, Winckler said the review made clear that these predictions haven’t been able to pin down the role of dust especially well.
Limited records from ice cores, marine sediment records, and other sources suggest that dust overall had also been increasing since pre-industrial times – in part due to development, agriculture, and other human impacts on landscapes. But the amount of dust also seems to have been decreasing since the 1980s.
More data and research is needed to better understand these dust patterns, Winckler said, and better predict how they will change in coming years.
But if dust in the atmosphere is decreasing, the warming effects of greenhouse gases could speed up.
“We could start to experience faster and faster warming because of this,” Kok said. “And maybe we’re waking up to that reality too late.”
U.K. woman’s dying wish: a funeral dance to ‘Another One Bites the Dust’
Wood, 65, wanted her coffin brought in late, because she never arrived to things on time. She envisioned it colored purple and decorated with letters that read: “Going out in style.” She asked that the funeral celebrant swear as much as possible.
And she wanted a troupe of dancers to crash her funeral, unannounced, and perform a routine to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”
That’s exactly what happened Nov. 4 at a crematorium in Bristol, England, when Ryalls and a group of Wood’s friends managed to arrange a unique send-off that fulfilled her wildest requests.
Midway through the service, Queen’s famous bass line suddenly blared through the hall and several dancers stood up, shrugged off their jackets and launched into a three-minute routine. Video of Wood’s funeral went viral on social media after a BBC report this week captured the scene. Ryalls said it was everything her friend would have wanted.
“She wanted us to remember her for the outrageous person she was,” Ryalls said.
Ryalls, who met Wood on a pub-darts team, called her the life of the party. She recalled her friend dressing in bright colors and telling animated stories from years spent working as a barmaid in pubs across Bristol. Wood loved shoes and insisted her horse-drawn hearse and coffin be decorated with a collection of stilettos, wedges and studded boots.
“She was just a massive character,” Ryalls said.
The dance mob that upstaged her funeral almost didn’t happen. Finding a dance team to take on Wood’s dying request proved difficult, Ryalls said. She was turned down by 10 groups, some of whom called the proposal disrespectful. In desperation, she posted a request on Facebook.
When cabaret dancer Claire Phipps saw the post, she couldn’t believe her luck.
“All summer I’d been chatting to people about really wanting to do a funeral,” Phipps told The Post. “But everyone looked at me like I was mad, like that was never going to happen.”
Phipps, who runs a Bristol dance troupe called the Flaming Feathers, said she was excited to take on the challenge. After receiving Wood’s song request, the group, which typically performs at cabarets and festivals, choreographed a routine and rehearsed for several weeks.
Then they sneaked into Wood’s funeral ahead of the crowd to snag the right seats.
“It was nerve wracking,” Phipps said. “Because we didn’t know how it would be taken.”
By the end of the song, to Phipps’s relief, people were clapping and laughing.
Wood died of tongue cancer in September, seven months after her February diagnosis. She’d already been struggling with a hepatitis C infection, Ryalls said, after being treated decades ago with contaminated blood by Britain’s National Health Service, part of a national scandal that prompted a public inquiry in 2019.
Wood’s battle with cancer was painful, Ryalls said. But her sense of humor kept her going.
“She was dying,” Ryalls said. “And she would say that medicine is laughter.”
It was also medicine for those closest to Wood. Mark Wood, Sandie’s husband, didn’t know about her outlandish plans either, he told The Post. At the funeral, he was consumed by grief and couldn’t focus. Then the music started playing — Sandie’s music.
“I said, ‘Yeah, that’s my Sandie,’” Mark said. “There was a big smile on my face because that was her. She didn’t want me to know that because she wanted to surprise me. And boy, didn’t she do it?”
The funeral lifted Mark Wood’s spirits. Sandie was “one in a million,” he said, and he’s still struggling to sleep since her death. He expressed frustration over the NHS scandal that sickened Sandie. The British government announced in August that affected patients would receive about $122,000 in compensation, but Mark Wood said he wished the government would also apologize.
But he said Sandie got the send-off she deserved.
“If she’s up there looking down, she’d be smiling, ” Mark said.
Sandie asked that her loved ones end the funeral by exiting in a conga line, Ryalls said, which everyone happily obliged. After the excitement, she had one final wish: that her funeral make news headlines around the world.
“The last wish that we couldn’t achieve has actually happened,” Ryalls said. “It’s incredible.”
Mars dust won’t bury Perseverance rover’s rock sample tubes
Neither dust nor wind nor dark of night will disturb new caches of precious Mars samples on the Red Planet.
This month, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been dropping lightsaber-shaped caches of material on the surface of Mars to lie in wait as backup for a future sample-return mission. Perseverance collects two samples at each location and carries one set with it. If the rover can’t bear the samples in its belly to a waiting spacecraft itself, two fetch helicopters will tote the backup surface tubes to the return rocket instead in the 2030s.
The epic NASA-European joint mission will allow researchers on Earth to scrutinize the tubed samples for signatures of life. Given the fetch mission isn’t expected to land until the 2030s, however, officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Twitter that they’ve heard public concerns about wind or dust hurting the tubes, or making the caches difficult to retrieve.
“My team’s not worried,” the official Perseverance account tweeted (opens in new tab) Dec. 23, along with a series of evidence showing why the tubes won’t travel far — and how NASA is tracking their deposit locations as the ultimate backup.
Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s 1st year on Mars
Unlike the fictional, powerful wind storm depicted at the start of “The Martian” (2015), the Red Planet has gentle gusts. Due to its thin atmosphere at only one-hundredth the pressure of Earth’s at sea level, Mars wind largely is confined to picking up fine sand grains.
“Winds around here can pick up *speed,* but they don’t pick up a lot of *stuff.* Think fast, but not strong,” the Perseverance account tweeted. In practical terms, winds are not the threat for nuclear-powered missions like Perseverance. The NASA Curiosity rover, for example, is still running after 10 Earth years on Mars with only a thin layer of dust covering the machinery, the account noted.
That said, dust coverage on solar panels (like NASA’s recently concluded InSight Mars lander mission) can pose a long-term threat to exploration, as they slowly choke off the supply to solar power — absent a lucky gust of wind. “It’s spelled the eventual end of more than one solar-powered explorer,” the Twitter thread noted of the dust.
Related: Can we save Mars robots from death by dust?
What about something smaller, sitting low on the surface? See this ribbon cable leading to @NASAInSight’s seismometer? After four years: a thin coat of dust, but easy to spot. (The pile of dirt you see over part of it is only there because InSight purposely put it there.) pic.twitter.com/UdpHVY18eADecember 23, 2022
Even for tubes that lie low on the surface, NASA expects they will be “easy to spot” based on examples like older footage from InSight. After four Earth years lying on the Red Planet ground, cables from InSight were admittedly dusty, but still recognizable.
“Not only do we expect the sample tubes not to be covered up,” the Perseverance account tweeted alongside a map, “but I’m also very carefully documenting exactly where I put them down. So going back to them again later shouldn’t be an issue.”
The backup mission is currently expected to arrive in nine years, or around 2031. Launch opportunities between Earth and Mars arise roughly every two years, giving several chances to send a mission out there before 2040 — assuming that funding for the sample return mission holds and technology development proceeds to plan.
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).
Can we save Mars robots from death by dust?
NASA’s Mars InSight lander died a slow death by dust last week. For months and months, the robot, built to study the tectonic activity on the Red Planet, has been running on less and less power as its 25-square-foott (4.2 square meters) solar power array gradually disappeared under a thick blanket of dust. On Wednesday (Dec. 21), NASA announced it hadn’t heard from the lander for days, officially pronouncing the mission dead.
InSight, which landed in the flat, seemingly uninteresting Elysium Planitia basin, south of Mars‘ equator in November 2018, exceeded its expected mission duration by two years. Still, many asked whether anything could have been done to save the otherwise perfectly healthy robot, which had been delivering groundbreaking science about the internal life of Mars.
Related: NASA’s Mars InSight lander ends mission after losing power
Cost versus benefit
In a Twitter thread (opens in new tab)posted about six weeks before InSight’s ultimate demise, NASA explained the trade-offs faced by engineers when designing a mission for the notoriously dusty Mars.
“People often ask: don’t I have a way to dust myself off (wiper, blower, etc.)? It’s a fair question, and the short answer is this,” NASA wrote on the lander’s Twitter account. “A system like that would have added cost, mass, and complexity. The simplest, most cost-effective way to meet my goals was to bring solar panels big enough to power my whole mission – which they did (and then some!).”
Dust storm season
When sending landers to Mars, space agencies usually try to avoid the planet’s dust storm season, which occurs during Mars’ northern autumn and winter periods. Since a year on Mars lasts about two Earth years, most of the recent landers and rovers, InSight included, made it through multiple dust storm seasons. The Curiosity rover, which is now in its 11th year on Mars and still going strong, has seen quite a few dust storm seasons. The rover even made measurements (opens in new tab) of the changing amount of dust accumulated on its sensors and deck, revealing how seasonal winds and dust devils help rovers keep going for longer. As it transpires, InSight was rather unlucky when it comes to Mars’ natural cleaning aid.
No dust devil car wash
Dust devils have been famously seen cleaning NASA’s older generation of Mars rovers, Spirit (opens in new tab) and Opportunity. Opportunity, in particular, was able to continue its mission for over 14 years, exceeding its designed three-month lifetime dozens of times. Regular dust devil sweeps and wind-induced cleaning events played an important role in that record-breaking mission. At the end, a huge dust storm in 2019 finally overpowered the little rover, ending its record-breaking journey of discovery.
According to Mike Williams, Chief Engineer at Airbus Defence and Space, which is currently rethinking the dust defense approach for the European ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, InSight seemed to have been in a “particularly unfavorable position for dust removal.”
Tilting solar panels
Williams agrees that NASA’s approach of outsized solar panels is the best, safest and cheapest when it comes to dust-proofing Mars-exploring spacecraft. However, Airbus is currently looking at the possibility of adding a dedicated dust defense capability, and they have plenty of time to do that. The mission, built in cooperation with Russia, was suspended in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The planned September launch was canceled, and Airbus is now storing the ExoMars rover in a clean room as some critical components, originally built by Russia, have to be replaced.
“Sizing the arrays to be able to manage the lower amount of sunlight that reaches them because of the dust is the best and simplest solution,” Williams told Space.com. “It’s the lowest level of complexity. It requires the least number of subsystems and functions and so it has the lowest risk. From the perspective of designing a mission, that’s definitely the most preferable way of going about it.”
Williams said that when the ExoMars mission was first conceived, engineers considered a plethora of dust cleaning technologies, including brushes, wipers, gas blowers and electrostatic wipers to get rid of the dust. At that time, they decided the rover, whose nominal mission in Oxia Planum was designed to last only 180 Martian days, or sols, didn’t need to self-clean. With the new launch date now expected no earlier than 2028, they are rethinking their approach again.
“With ExoMars now being reborn, we are looking at possibly reinstating some of that capability,” Williams said. “We could use something like solar panel tilting to possibly dislodge some of that dust. It would also help point the panels more efficiently at the sun, which may also have some benefits.”
Williams added that Airbus engineers, just like NASA’s, have to reconcile with the fact that ExoMars, just like other spacecraft on Mars, may eventually succumb to dust, and won’t be disappointed if the rover outlasts its designed mission lifetime only marginally. Although they hope to get some help from Martian weather just like Spirit and Opportunity.
“It’s just, it’s just the way it goes with space missions, unfortunately,” Williams said.
InSight’s self-cleaning attempt
Even though InSight wasn’t built to wipe dust off of itself, NASA made some last resort attempts to help the lander remove some of the dust in the final months of its life as the amount of electricity generated by its panels dwindled.
In May, ground controllers commanded InSight’s robotic arm to sprinkle a bit of sand across one of the lander’s dust-covered panels. As wind blew the sand grains across the panel, they actually picked up some of the dust along the way, reducing the thickness of the sun-obstructing dust blanket.
The operation enabled the lander to gain about 30 watt-hours of energy per sol at that time, according to a NASA statement (opens in new tab).
In the end, nature won. As it always does. And InSight certainly didn’t go down without a fight.
Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
After a long struggle with Martian dust, NASA’s InSight probe has gone quiet
Enlarge / This is probably the last image taken by InSight on the surface of Mars and relayed back to Earth.
NASA
NASA’s InSight lander has probably phoned home for the last time from the planet Mars.
The space agency said the spacecraft did not respond to communications from Earth on Sunday, December 18. The lack of communications came as the lander’s power-generating capacity has been declining in recent months due to the accumulation of Martian dust on its solar panels. NASA said that it is “assumed” that InSight has reached the end of its operations but that it will continue to try to contact the lander in the coming days.
Also on Monday, the InSight Twitter account shared a photo with a message saying this was probably the last photo it was sending from Mars.
My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send. Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will – but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me. pic.twitter.com/wkYKww15kQ
— NASA InSight (@NASAInSight) December 19, 2022
InSight landed on Mars in 2018 with the aim of studying seismic activity. It has been a success—InSight has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes, including a relatively powerful magnitude 4.7 quake on May 4. This was the largest marsquake detected to date and at the upper limit of what scientists hoped to observe. This seismic activity has allowed scientists to tease out details about the inner structure of the red planet.
However, during its operations on Mars, dust has steadily accumulated on the stationary lander’s solar panels. By May 2022, the panels were producing just 500 watt-hours of energy, a tenth of what they could generate upon landing on Mars. Since then, its power levels have steadily declined to the point where InSight does not have the juice necessary to radio back to Earth.
Saying goodbye to spacecraft such as InSight is always difficult. Humans send these robotic probes out into the frigid depths of the Solar System to increase our scientific understanding. Over that time, they shine brightly for a few years. And then, they’re gone.
Look, I’m not sure why water is running down from your eyes. But speaking for myself, that’s Martian dust causing tears to come out of my eyes. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Pierces Through Dust Clouds to Unveil Young Stars in Early Stages of Formation
Image of the Cosmic Cliffs, a region at the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). This image shows invisible near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated into visible-light colors. Credit: Science: Megan Reiter (Rice University), Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI)
Webb’s Infrared Capabilities Pierce Through Dust Clouds to Make Rare Find
Searching for buried treasure isn’t easy. It can be a painstaking, even frustrating, process. It is common to sift through the proverbial sand for hours and hours and rarely hit the jackpot. However, with
Dozens of previously hidden jets and outflows from young stars are revealed in this new image of the Cosmic Cliffs from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The Cosmic Cliffs, a region at the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, has long intrigued astronomers as a hotbed for star formation.
Many details of star formation in NGC 3324 remain hidden at visible-light wavelengths. Webb is perfectly primed to tease out these long-sought-after details since it can detect jets and outflows seen only in the infrared at high resolution.
This image separates out several wavelengths of light from the iconic First Image revealed on July 12, 2022, which highlight molecular hydrogen, a vital ingredient for star formation. Insets on the right-hand side highlight three regions of the Cosmic Cliffs with particularly active molecular hydrogen outflows.
In this image, red, green, and blue were assigned to Webb’s NIRCam data at 4.7, 4.44, and 1.87 microns (F470N, F444W, and F187N filters, respectively).
Credit: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Science: Megan Reiter (Rice University), Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI)
Webb Space Telescope Unveils Young Stars in Early Stages of Formation
Scientists taking a “deep dive” into one of Webb’s iconic first images have discovered dozens of energetic jets and outflows from young stars previously hidden by dust clouds. The discovery marks the beginning of a new era of investigating how stars like our Sun form, and how the radiation from nearby massive stars might affect the development of planets.
The Cosmic Cliffs, a region at the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within the star cluster NGC 3324, has long intrigued astronomers as a hotbed for star formation. While well-studied by the
Recently, by analyzing data from a specific wavelength of infrared light (4.7 microns), astronomers discovered two dozen previously unknown outflows from extremely young stars revealed by molecular hydrogen. Webb’s observations uncovered a gallery of objects ranging from small fountains to burbling behemoths that extend light-years from the forming stars. Many of these protostars are poised to become low mass stars, like our Sun.
“What Webb gives us is a snapshot in time to see just how much star formation is going on in what may be a more typical corner of the universe that we haven’t been able to see before,” said astronomer Megan Reiter of Rice University in Houston, Texas, who led the study.
Molecular hydrogen is a vital ingredient for making new stars and an excellent tracer of the early stages of their formation. As young stars gather material from the gas and dust that surround them, most also eject a fraction of that material back out again from their polar regions in jets and outflows. These jets then act like a snowplow, bulldozing into the surrounding environment. Visible in Webb’s observations is the molecular hydrogen getting swept up and excited by these jets.
“Jets like these are signposts for the most exciting part of the star formation process. We only see them during a brief window of time when the protostar is actively accreting,” explained co-author Nathan Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth.
Called the Cosmic Cliffs, the region is actually the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, roughly 7,600 light-years away. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image. The high-energy radiation from these stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away.
NIRCam – with its crisp resolution and unparalleled sensitivity – unveils hundreds of previously hidden stars, and even numerous background galaxies.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Previous observations of jets and outflows looked mostly at nearby regions and more evolved objects that are already detectable in the visual wavelengths seen by Hubble. The unparalleled sensitivity of Webb allows observations of more distant regions, while its infrared optimization probes into the dust-sampling younger stages. Together this provides astronomers with an unprecedented view into environments that resemble the birthplace of our solar system.
“It opens the door for what’s going to be possible in terms of looking at these populations of newborn stars in fairly typical environments of the universe that have been invisible up until the James Webb Space Telescope,” added Reiter. “Now we know where to look next to explore what variables are important for the formation of Sun-like stars.”
This period of very early star formation is especially difficult to capture because, for each individual star, it’s a relatively fleeting event – just a few thousand to 10,000 years amid a multi-million-year process of star formation.
“In the image first released in July (see image above), you see hints of this activity, but these jets are only visible when you embark on that deep dive – dissecting data from each of the different filters and analyzing each area alone,” shared team member Jon Morse of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It’s like finding buried treasure.”
This image, released for Hubble’s 17th anniversary, shows a region of star birth and death in the Carina Nebula. The nebula contains at least a dozen brilliant stars that are 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun. Credit for Hubble Image: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Credit for CTIO Image: N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley) and NOAO/AURA/NSF
In analyzing the new Webb observations, astronomers are also gaining insights into how active these star-forming regions are, even in a relatively short time span. By comparing the position of previously known outflows in this region caught by Webb, to archival data by Hubble from 16 years ago (see image above), the scientists were able to track the speed and direction in which the jets are moving.
This science was conducted on observations collected as part of Webb’s Early Release Observations Program. The paper was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in December 2022.
Reference: “Deep diving off the ‘Cosmic Cliffs’: previously hidden outflows in NGC 3324 revealed by JWST” by Megan Reiter, Jon A Morse, Nathan Smith, Thomas J Haworth, Michael A Kuhn and Pamela D Klaassen, 4 October 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac2820
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
Listen to The Sound of a Dust Devil Churning Across Mars : ScienceAlert
The Martian soundscape can be as hauntingly alien as one might hope to hear on another world. The boom of occasional meteorite impacts, the groan of the quaking ground, the whisper of an endless wind.
Now we get a front-row seat at the approach and retreat of a roaring devil as it scours the surface, helping drive the cycle of dust through the atmosphere and around the small, rust-stained world.
Perseverance was the first rover to reach the surface of Mars with a working microphone attached, and the instrument has been put to good use since the rover landed in February 2021. The mic is part of a suite of recording tools on the rover known as the SuperCam.
It’s thanks to this innovative piece of technology that we can hear for the first time what a miniature whirlwind of dust sounds like on another planet. It’s eerie and brief and quite fantastic at the same time.
“We can learn a lot more using sound than we can with some of the other tools,” says planetary scientist Roger Wiens from Purdue University in Indiana.
“They take readings at regular intervals.”
“The microphone lets us sample, not quite at the speed of sound, but nearly 100,000 times a second. It helps us get a stronger sense of what Mars is like.”
Perseverance’s microphone actually only records for three minutes a day: this is the first time it’s been on when a dust devil has wandered past, even though other instruments have recorded evidence of almost 100 other whirlwinds where the rover is based in the Jezero Crater.
The dust devil passed over the rover on 27 September 2021 – the 215th Martian day (or sol) of its mission. Scientists estimate that the size of the dust devil was around 25 meters (just over 80 feet) wide, while it would have been at least 118 meters (387 feet) tall.
By combining photographs with readings of wind, pressure, temperature, and dust, Perseverance was also able to track the speed of the mini-Martian tornado as it passed, which came in at 19 kilometers (12 miles) per hour.
“This chance dust devil encounter demonstrates the potential of acoustic data for resolving the rapid wind structure of the Martian atmosphere,” Wiens and colleagues write in their paper.
The surrounding winds would’ve been faster, and in the recording, you can hear the silence that reflects the calm eye of this particular tiny storm. Part of what makes the new information valuable is how it compares to events like this on Earth.
“The wind is fast – about 25 miles per hour, but about what you would see in a dust devil on Earth,” says Wiens. “The difference is that the air pressure on Mars is so much lower that the winds, while just as fast, push with about 1 percent of the pressure the same speed of wind would have back on Earth.”
“It’s not a powerful wind, but clearly enough to loft particles of grit into the air to make a dust devil.”
All of the data that we’re currently collecting on Mars is useful for a variety of reasons. For one, it gives us a better idea of how the planet evolved, which in turn gives scientists clues to how other planets in the Universe might be evolving too.
Those other planets include Earth, and as Mars is our closest planetary neighbor, our histories are closely intertwined. Comparing Earth and Mars gives us a better idea of the past and the future of both planets.
There’s also humankind’s ambition to one day set foot on Mars. Recordings like this hint at the sort of conditions we can expect, and how those conditions might be protected against or utilized – the way that wind might naturally clear solar panels, for example.
“Just like Earth, there is different weather in different areas on Mars,” says Wiens. “Using all of our instruments and tools, especially the microphone, helps us get a concrete sense of what it would be like to be on Mars.”
The research has been published in Nature Communications.