While there is no officially acknowledged “man in the moon,” there is a LADEE (channel your inner Scot as you say it, “lad-ee”), or there will be soon. NASA’s upcoming Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is slated for launch today! This mission will give us a chance to revisit the lunar surface in great detail—and possibly determine the cause of some strange observations made decades ago during the Apollo missions.

When taking coronal photographs in 1971, the Apollo 15 astronauts found what they described as “excessive brightness” on the lunar surface. One objective of the LADEE mission is to determine the nature of this glow, thought to be a loose lunar atmosphere. (If an atmosphere exists, it’s much, MUCH less dense than ours.) The glow could also be caused by electrostatically charged dust that hovers around the lunar surface.

In order to get to the Moon, LADEE will take off on a Minotaur V launch vehicle, made from a converted peacekeeper missile—the first launch of its kind. It’s based on the Minotaur IV system, which has been used successfully many times.

After launch, LADEE will spend 30 days making its way to the Moon and establishing a stable orbit 156 kilometers above the surface; it will spend the next 30 days aligning, checking out, and tuning up its scientific instruments. The 100-day-long science portion of the mission will then allow NASA researchers to observe the lunar environment carefully and put to rest the 38-year-old mystery.

The tools onboard consist of an Ultraviolet and Visible Light Spectrometer (UVS), which will analyze chemical compounds and determine their elemental makeup; the Neutral Mass Spectrometer (NMS), which will help determine just how much atmosphere the moon has; and finally, the Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX).

LADEE will also establish a higher bandwidth, more robust connection than any prior lunar mission, using laser-based communication instead of the traditional low-power radio-based system enabling more information to be sent faster. That’s right! NASA is deploying experimental space lasers to communicate with LADEE. How sci fi is that?

LADEE represents a synthesis of both new and well-tested technologies and a great chance for us to better understand our nearest neighbor in space.

Josh Roberts is a program presenter and astronomer at the California Academy of Sciences. He also contributes content to Morrison Planetarium productions.

Image: NASA EDGE

Recently, the search for extrasolar planets (a.k.a. exoplanets) has centered around finding an Earth-like world, a place where life as we know it could exist. After all, wouldn’t it be exciting to discover extraterrestrials—or at least a new place humans could inhabit? Problematically, these small, potentially inhabitable planets are terribly challenging to detect. Twenty years of searching has yielded 941 (and counting) confirmed planets, but none very much like Earth… Although we are well on our way to finding such a “Goldilocks” world (not too hot, not too cold, but juuuust right), other, often larger exoplanets are proving easier to find and uniquely interesting.

A significant percentage of the exoplanets uncovered so far are “hot Jupiters”—colossal gas giant worlds that equal or surpass the mass of Jupiter and orbit very close to their parent stars, creating high surface temperatures as a result. One particularly interesting giant is HD 189733b, a massive world a mere 63 light years away. Though discovered in 2005, its proximity to our solar system makes it a good exoplanet to examine.

Some of the more interesting recent studies of this exoplanet leave behind the question of habitability to examine different planetary characteristics. In 2008, astrophysicists used polarimetry to detect and monitor the planet in visible light and determined an overall color of the world as it would appear to us. A second set of independent tests came back just this last month with the same result. The planet, as we would perceive it, is cobalt blue!

The discovery of another blue marble in the Milky Way is enticing. But this blue color is obviously not due to liquid oceans covering its surface. So where is the color coming from? It could be caused by a slow shower of molten glass. Observations have shown the likely presence of silicate particles in the lower atmosphere. This would scatter light in such a ways as to appear blue in the visible spectrum. Silicate is a component of glass which has lead some researchers to suspect the atmosphere might rain intensely heated bits of molten glass. Certainly not a storm you would want to be caught in!

Looking closer at the planet, all similarities to Earth continue to sizzle away. Orbiting 30 times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun (which works out to about 13 times closer to its star than Mercury is from the Sun), this planet definitely qualifies as a HOT Jupiter: 1,200°F (650°C) on the night side to 1,700°F (930°C) on the day side with winds as fast as 6,000 miles per hour (nearly a thousand kilometers per hour). This is not a life-friendly place. In fact, Scott Wolk of the Center for Astrophysics estimates the atmosphere of the planet is boiling away at about 660,000 to 100 million tons of mass per second.

HD 189733b is a fantastic example of the surprises that continue to amaze us as we learn more about our universe. Hot Jupiters are not places we study in the hopes of finding life. Rather, we explore these fascinating places so different from our own world to learn about the diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy. They help us uncover more about the evolution of planets and allow us to probe the conditions that came together to form the immense diversity of worlds that we see. They provide clues and contrasts to our own planet, where the processes of life were able to take hold and evolve.

Could Earth have once been a hot Jupiter instead? Quite unlikely. Can HD 189733b ever be the next Earth? Not likely. But these bizarre and far-off worlds are certainly engaging in their own right.

Elise Ricard holds a master’s degree in museum education and is a presenter at Morrison Planetarium.

Images: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Poppenhaeger et al; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

Early last week I wrote an article about how new data from Voyager 1 shed light on the structure of the Sun’s heliosphere and solar wind. Just a few days after that, researchers announced evidence of Earth’s own space wind!

Scientists proposed the existence of a space wind surrounding Earth about 20 years ago, but direct detection has eluded scientists until now.

Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that encloses our magnetosphere. The plasmasphere is the inner part of that magnetosphere, and it looks a giant donut made of electrically-charged particles called (as its name suggests) plasma.

The Sun’s magnetic activity can accelerate plasma toward Earth, which impacts our magnetosphere. During such solar storms, we have observed plumes of material transfer between the plasmasphere and the outer magnetosphere, but researchers also proposed the existence of a steady flow of plasma that occurs around the clock. After years of theoretical work, Iannis Dandouras of the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, has directly detected this wind in data from the European Space Agency’s Cluster spacecraft.

Dandouras measured the properties of charged particles in the plasmasphere to find that the forces governing plasma motion exist slightly out of balance, forming a steady wind.

“After long scrutiny of the data, there it was, a slow but steady wind, releasing about one kilogram of plasma every second into the outer magnetosphere. This corresponds to almost 90 tons every day. It was definitely one of the nicest surprises I’ve ever had!” said Dandouras.

Don’t worry, the plasmasphere won’t evaporate away: it also refills. Dandouras reassured everyone that “due to the plasmaspheric wind, supplying plasma—from the upper atmosphere below it—to refill the plasmasphere is like pouring matter into a leaky container.”

Michael Pinnock, Editor-in-Chief of Annales Geophysicae, recognizes the importance of the new result. “It is a very nice proof of the existence of the plasmaspheric wind. It’s a significant step forward in validating the theory. Models of the plasmasphere, whether for research purposes or space weather applications (e.g. GPS signal propagation) should now take this phenomenon into account.”

We can even apply our understanding of Earth’s plasmaspheric wind to other places. Why wouldn’t another planet such as Jupiter or Saturn experience the exact same phenomenon? The Solar System could be a very windy place!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA

The surface temperature of the Sun is about 6,000 Kelvins, while the outer edge of the Sun’s atmosphere, called the corona, can reach millions of Kelvins. Normally, we think of things cooling down the farther they get from an energy source… So how can temperature increase with distance from the Sun’s surface?

The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecraft launches from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on June 27th, with the intention of studying how the corona gets so hot.

“I wonder if maybe we were staring too hard at the corona to understand the corona,” says IRIS scientist Charles Kankelborg, a physicist at Montana State University. “It may be that by backing out we can get some vital clues to what’s happening.”

Between the Sun’s surface and the corona lies a layer of plasma called the chromosphere. Scientists hope that studying this area of lower atmosphere will help them uncover the reason behind the Sun’s strange temperature patterns.

From Earth, we can only observe the layer in question during a total solar eclipse, when the Moon blocks the Sun, and observers can see the halo of glowing light behind the Moon. For IRIS to see this section of sun, it will take images at temperatures between 4,500 Kelvins and 65,000 Kelvins, and ultraviolet spectra between 4,5000 Kelvin and 107 Kelvin.

IRIS is specially designed to target this little understood region of the Sun’s atmosphere. The spacecraft will follow a polar orbit—always facing the Sun—to trace the flow of energy and plasma from the lower layer of the Sun’s surface through the chromosphere and into the corona. Detailed information on this process could give astronomers an archetype for other stellar atmospheres.

Dr. Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator and physicist at the ATC Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, is excited for the launch. “With IRIS, we have a unique opportunity to provide significant missing pieces in our understanding of energy transport on the Sun. The complex processes and enormous contrasts of density, temperature and magnetic field within this interface region require instrument and modeling capabilities that are now finally within our reach.”

The launch takes place on Thursday, so the newest data about our closest star are coming soon!

You can watch the launch here at 6:00pm PDT!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA