Chris Lintott’s Universe

I wrote yesterday about waiting a few years to watch the planets around HD 8799 move, and completely missed the fact that the Hubble Space Telescope has managed to do exactly this for one planet in Formaulhaut’s dust disk.

Here’s the disk :

Credit : NASA/STSci

And here are two images of the planet, superimposed, from 2004 and 2006.

Credit : NASA/STSci

I still want to see HD 8799′s whole system whizz round their parent star, but this is stunning.

Seeing the first images of extrasolar planets around a star is a stunning moment. I found out about this earlier in the week, and have had to keep quiet (along with all the other journalists) until the embargo passed, but feast your eyes on this.

Credit : Keck Observatory

The speckle pattern is what’s left of the star’s light – most of it has been blocked to allow us to see the three, faint dots which are believed to be planets. The arrows show the direction of motion, which brings me to my main point. Imagine this : in a decade or so, someone is going to take another snapshot of the same system. We’ll actually be able to watch planets circle their parent star. It’s a mindblowing thought – as fundamental, if you’ll forgive the late night hyperbole, as Galileo’s observations of Jupiter’s moons.

Over the last year or so, the denziens of the Galaxy Zoo forum have been getting together to talk astronomy over a beer or two. This seems like a splendid idea, so if you’re free on Sunday 23rd November and in – or can get to – central London, then please join me and the indomitable Pamela Gay, host of the wildly successful Astronomy Cast.

We’ll be in Mabel’s Tavern in Bloomsbury, not a million miles from my old stomping ground of UCL between 2 and 5pm.

As we found out yesterday, dust storms ended the life of Phoenix, and today a JPL release tells us that Spirit is now suffering, producing less energy from its solar panels than it has at any point in the past five years. The forecast is better for the next few days, but the fear is that dust which has settled onto the solar panels will stay there unless a friendly gust of wind blows it off.

We always knew Phoenix was going to reach the end of its mission sooner rather than later, but Spirit and Opportunity had begun to look invincible. The mission team are clearly thinking similar thoughts, with the recent decision to send Opportunity off across the Martian plains to a distant crater. Let’s hope this is nothing more than a timely reminder that Mars is a harsh place for a spacecraft, and that Spirit hangs on for the better weather that’s on the way.

I’m in the office late, but am distracted by listening in to a Phoenix press teleconference happening right now. I hope the news isn’t as bad as I think it might be. Watch this space…

Update :

A few sols ago, they were doing the last of their significant science days; they’d been planning to turn off the heaters and keep an eye on the weather, and maybe just do a few images. The only problem was that a dust storm blew in, which threw out the calculations for how much power they would have. They failed to keep the batteries from ‘browning out’ – running out of power entirely. For the next few nights, Phoenix fell asleep and then woke up during the day and managed to say hello. However, power got less and less, and on November 5th2nd the team received their last communication.

While the team will be listening, they’re officially declaring Phoenix dead. A wonderful mission is over, just over 150 sols after touching down on the surface of Mars. Now the scientists can work on their data without distraction! They certainly have lots to keep them busy.

Wired’s epitaph contest has a lot of attention, but here are the winners. The winner’s excellent.

Update 2 :

The following tweet just appeared on Mars Phoenix’s Twitter feed :

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3

Update 3 :

As we reported on the last episode of the Sky at Night, Peter Smith sounds very, very convinced that the soil Phoenix has been sampling is recent, rather than old. This may account for some of the differences from the Spirit and Opportunity results, but more excitingly suggests that the Martian surface is still changing.

Tonight’s Sky at Night includes a report from the Phoenix Mission Control in Tucson. We recorded it a couple of weeks ago, and while everything in there is still true, events on the surface of the red planet have moved on.

While not dead yet, having successfully communicated with an orbiting spacecraft on Thursday, in most meaningful ways Phoenix’s life as a scientific explorer is over.

Deciphering the results from Phoenix‘s five months or so on the surface will take a lot of time. The experiments it carried were among the most ambitious ever flown, and perhaps the frustrations – soil too sticky to fall swiftly into an oven, for example – were inevitable. I’m disappointed in particular that a measurement of the isotopic ratio of the ice (which would have given us clues as to when it last was liquid) proved impossible, but the scientific bounty from the mission is immense, and no amount of scientific greed should detract from the fact that Phoenix was hugely successful.

Credit and kudos should also go to the mission’s media team. In the five or so years I’ve been doing the Sky at Night, we’ve never been made more welcome by a mission than we were the three times we visited Phoenix in Tucson. One of the team who looked after us, Carla Bitter, Education and Public Outreach manager, has written about her feelings on the Phoenix blog.

As you can imagine, communicating real science in real time here on Earth about the daily happenings on Mars can have even the best minds reeling at the complexities of sharing new information quickly and authentically, sometimes before we really know what it all means. This is the time before mere information becomes knowledge. The time you’d like to stay quiet, to think and wonder about the data. The time it takes to assess, to examine, to argue, to understand, then finally to explain and share these new findings.

Here, we disagree. The joy of the Phoenix mission is that they’ve taken us along with them while they’ve thought, and wondered, examined and argued, doing their best to explain and share what they’re doing. If more missions did this, then we might begin to move away from the idea that our explorers of the solar system send back the Answers, complete with press release and Nature paper and with no further work required. I may be waiting eagerly for the flood of scientific papers to start flowing now that the team have more time on their hands, but I’ve enjoyed this period of glorious uncertainty too.