The night skies could be more spectacular than usual this month, thanks to the Orionid meteor shower.
The
annual meteor shower is considered to be one of the most beautiful
meteor showers of the year, known for lighting up dark skies with
bright, fast meteors that can leave long-lingering light trails, according to NASA.
This
autumnal meteor shower can also sometimes produce fireballs:
exceptionally bright meteors that can be witnessed over a very wide
area.
The
Orionids earned their name by appearing to originate from the part of
the sky that contains the constellation Orion, but Orionid meteors are
actually fragments of dust left in the wake of the famous Halley’s
Comet, which also produces the Eta Aquarids meteor shower every spring.
The
2022 Orionids are already underway and will last through November 22,
peaking in the pre-dawn hours of October 21 with about 10-20 meteors per
hour.
For
the best chance of seeing the most spectacular meteors, NASA says to
gaze at the southeastern sky about 45 to 90 degrees away from the
constellation Orion. If you can’t find Orion, no problem — just face the
southeastern sky and give your eyes about a half-hour to adjust to the
darkness, at which point you should start seeing meteors.
You
don’t need special equipment to view the Orionids; just dress warmly
and head out after midnight under clear skies, as dark as possible, to
where you can take in a large expanse of the night sky. Some of
Michigan’s best spots for stargazing include remote lakeshores, dark sky
parks, and much of the Upper Peninsula.
The exploration of Saturn’s largest moon Titan is set to take to the sky.
NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon will touch down on a
terrain of dunes and shattered, icy bedrock, according to a new
analysis of radar imagery from the Cassini spacecraft.
Launching in 2027, Dragonfly is a rotorcraft that will arrive in 2034 and explore Titan
from the air. Its range will be far greater than that of a wheeled
rover, with Dragonfly capable of covering around 10 miles (16
kilometers) in each half-hour flight, according to NASA.
Over the span of its two-year mission it will explore an area hundreds
of miles or kilometers across. However, before taking to the sky on its
own, Dragonfly must first arrive on Titan under a parachute,
soft-landing on frozen terrain that is hidden from easy viewing by the
dense hydrocarbon smog that fills the moon’s atmosphere.
Dragonfly’s landing site will be the Shangri-La dune field, close to the 50-mile-wide (80 kilometers) crater, Selk. This region was imaged by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft during its mission to Saturn
between 2004 and 2017, and a team of scientists led by planetary
scientist Léa Bonnefoy of Cornell University has taken a new look at
that data to produce the most accurate assessment of Dragonfly’s
proposed landing site so far.
“Dragonfly … is going to a scientifically remarkable area,” Bonnefoy said in a statement (opens in new tab).
“Dragonfly will land in an equatorial, dry region of Titan. It rains
liquid methane sometimes, but it is more like a desert on Earth where
you have dunes, some little mountains and an impact crater.“ …
“The primitive biosphere had a self-destructive effect.”
Ancient microbes triggered a climate change on Mars that made the
planet less habitable, which may have ultimately led to their
extinction, a new climate modeling study suggests.
According to the study, simple microbes that feed on hydrogen and excrete methane could have thrived on Mars some 3.7 billion years ago, at about the same time that primitive life was taking hold in Earth’s primordial oceans. But while on Earth the emergence of simple life
gradually created an environment conducive to more complex life forms,
the exact opposite happened on Mars, according to a team of scientists
led by astrobiologist Boris Sauterey from the Institut de Biologie de
l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (IBENS) in Paris, France. …
