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31 Articles

Welcome to the ALL ABOUT SPACE ANNUAL

This year we’ve celebrated 10 years of orbiting Mars, as a decade ago NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) arrived at the Red Planet, and the decision has been made for Dawn to continue orbiting and exploring Ceres. Space exploration is uncovering new wonders with every step. In the All About Space Annual 2017 we take a look at the record-breaking astronauts journeying outside our atmosphere and the planets that make up our Solar System and our cosmic backyard. We journey beyond our home Solar System and even the Milky Way, observing Venus-like exoplanets and Earth’s violent universes. We dive into the depths of worm holes and take a look at some of the incredible experiments that have been conducted on the ISS. Then we look to the future to the…

Welcome to the ALL ABOUT SPACE ANNUAL

50 GREATEST DISCOVERIES

The votes are in and counted and now All About Space presents the greatest astronomical discoveries of all time, as chosen by our readers. Some of the greatest moments in space science have come as humans have gazed up to the heavens, sent spacecraft to explore other worlds, and marvelled at how nature has developed this wonderfully complex cosmos that we live in. Science is also a cumulative process, where one discovery leads to another and so on, and astronomy is no different. The discovery that there are galaxies beyond the Milky Way led to the discovery of the expansion of the universe, for example. As we run down the 50 greatest discoveries to celebrate All About Space's 50th issue in April 2016, it’s worth remembering all the other…

50 GREATEST DISCOVERIES

ARE WE ALONE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM?

Potentially habitable worlds in the Solar System Mars So much has been said about Mars’ potential habitability. As the fourth planet from the Sun, it sits at the edge of the habitable zone where conditions are almost right for liquid water to exist. Recent evidence has shown there were once vast bodies of water on the surface billions of years ago, and there are still dribbles of water today. But we still don’t know if it did, or still does, host life. Europa Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of the icy satellites believed to have a vast ocean beneath its frozen crust that extends several miles deep. Here, life would be protected from solar radiation, while Europa’s eccentric orbit around Jupiter pushes and pulls the core, providing a heat source…

ARE WE ALONE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM?

Hunting for life on Mars

ExoMars is set to be the first European-led rover to land on the surface of Mars. Its launch on a Russian rocket is scheduled for 2018 and, despite concerns that this might slip back, this would allow for a Mars landing in 2019 with the help of a Russian-built lander. Compared to NASA’s Curiosity rover, it weighs about 600 kilograms (1,320 pounds) less at 310 kilograms (680 pounds), and it will rely on solar power while Curiosity has a nuclear power source – plutonium-238. The biggest difference, though, is their goals. While Curiosity was sent to ascertain the habitability of Mars in the past and present, ExoMars will be directly searching for the possibility of life on the Red Planet today. The suite of instruments on board ExoMars includes a…

Hunting for life on Mars

HOW WE'LL FIND ANOTHER EARTH

The first discovery of an exoplanet heralded a revolution for astronomy, eventually revealing just how many such objects could exist in the galaxy. It turns out that they are a legion. Now a second, more exciting revolution is taking place in exoplanetary science: the search for habitable, Earth-like worlds. When the first exoplanets – planets in other star systems – were being found from 1989 onwards, they were initially gas giants like Jupiter, and quite often much larger. Exoplanet detection was very much in its infancy throughout the 1990s due to the technological limitations of the time, so it made sense that large gas giants – and even larger ‘brown dwarf objects’ – would be the first targets to be spotted. Those orbiting very close to their parent stars…

HOW WE'LL FIND ANOTHER EARTH

Record-breaking ASTRONAUTS

There appears to be a record for just about anything. From the longest fingernails and the fastest tortoise to the largest arcade machine and the wealthiest cat, they can range from the curious to the downright weird. Tens of thousands of people from virtually every country across the globe clamour for a place in the record books each year, but few are as out-of-this world as the feats that have taken place in space. In April this year, Guinness World Records confirmed that ESA astronaut Tim Peake had achieved the fastest marathon in orbit, having run the London Marathon 400 kilometres (249 miles) above Earth on the International Space Station (ISS) in a rapid three hours, 35 minutes and 21 seconds. In March 2015, it awarded two world records…

Record-breaking ASTRONAUTS

10 YEARS AROUND MARS

Mission objectives Understand the present climate of Mars Work out the nature of the complex Martian terrain Search for evidence of aqueous and hydrothermal activity Identify landing sites for future Mars missions Return data from craft on the surface during relay phase 10 March 2006 Arrival at Mars The MRO arrives in Martian orbit, initially entering a highly elliptical orbit over the planet’s poles. After initial checks, MRO begins an aerobraking manoeuvre that takes five months to complete, taking advantage of the natural brake provided by friction with the atmosphere to save thruster fuel. By the time the process is complete in early September, MRO’s 112-minute orbit around Mars ranges between 250 to 316 kilometres (155 to 196 miles) above the surface. The science operations are postponed until November to…

10 YEARS AROUND MARS

THINK YOU KNOW OUR SUN?

Carved on the walls and sarcophagi of the pyramids located at the vast ancient burial ground of Saqqara are mentions of Amun, the Ancient Egyptian god of creation. He was thought to reside inside the Sun and his role in Egyptian life became very important as a result. But only when he was later combined with the Sun god Ra to become the God of Kings, did he rise to be the most worshipped ruler of them all. He was, as the Hymn to Amun-Ra describes him, the “Lord of things that are” and it was recognition of the Sun’s power as much as anything else. Fast forward to today though, and we know one thing for certain: no being – whether real or mythical – actually lives inside the…

THINK YOU KNOW OUR SUN?

Exploring Venus

How to get there How big is Venus? With an equatorial diameter of 12,100 kilometres (7,520 miles), Venus is just 638 kilometres (396 miles) smaller than Earth (roughly five per cent). How far is Venus? The distance to Venus varies hugely depending on its position relative to Earth. At its closest approach Venus can be just 38.2 million kilometres away (23.7 million miles), while at its most distant it can be up to 261 million kilometres (162 million miles) from Earth. After the Moon, Venus is usually the brightest object in Earth’s night sky – a brilliant morning or evening ‘star’ usually seen either in the east before sunrise or in the west after sunset. Its perpetual loose attachment to the Sun is due to the relative positions of planets…

Exploring Venus

STRANGEST MOONS IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM

All but two of our Solar System’s planets have satellites of one sort or another. Earth’s own Moon, a beautiful but stark, dead world shaped by ancient volcanoes and countless impact craters, is undoubtedly the most familiar, but it’s far from being the most interesting – each of the outer Solar System’s giant planets is accompanied by a large retinue of satellites, many of which formed at the same time and from the same ice-rich material as the planets. Although far from the Sun and starved of solar heat and light, they nevertheless show as much variety as the planets themselves. All About Space takes a trip to visit some of the strangest and most exciting of these astonishing worlds. Some, such as Jupiter’s Callisto and Saturn’s Mimas, have…

STRANGEST MOONS IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM

CERES UNCOVERED

Dawn’s science objectives ✓ Study the early Solar System via Ceres and Vesta ✓ Understand the building blocks of terrestrial planets ✓ Study the internal structure of Ceres and Vesta ✓ Determine surface shape and cratering on both ✓ Measure the mass, gravity, and rotation of both asteroids ✓ Determine their thermal history and the shape of their cores ✓ Understand the role of water in asteroid evolution ✓ Test the theory that some meteorites on Earth came from Vesta ✓ Extensively map the surface of both worlds “ Dawn has single-handedly explored about 40 per cent of the mass contained in the asteroid belt” Dr Marc Rayman, Dawn mission director In science fiction, we are used to seeing spacecraft fly from one planet to another with ease. But in…

CERES UNCOVERED

THE HUNT FOR WORMHOLES

It was the plot for an epic 2014 Hollywood blockbuster. In Interstellar, a crew of astronauts travel across space on the hunt for an alternative home for humanity. Yet they don’t leave our Solar System by the conventional route; instead, they head into a wormhole in the vicinity of Saturn and emerge almost immediately in a distant galaxy. These wormholes – shortcuts in space and time – have long been a staple of science fiction. But some scientists believe we may soon be able to prove that they are just as real a part of the universe as the Sun and the stars or you and I. The scientific term for this exotic object is an Einstein-Rosen bridge, which is a clue as to where the idea came from.…

THE HUNT FOR WORMHOLES

How wormholes are made

1 Collapse of the core When a gigantic star – with a mass much more than 20 times the mass of the Sun – dies, sometimes a black hole is formed. When we refer to a star dying, we mean that it no longer has any nuclear fuel to burn and this means that gravity is unable to override an outward force. The core has no choice but to collapse in on itself in the catastrophic explosion of a supernova. The devastated star’s outer layers are expelled into space while the core continues to shrink in size. 2 A cosmic plughole Shrinking smaller and smaller, the core continues to pale in significance compared to its former stellar glory, collapsing into an even smaller size. However, while it has shrunk to…

How wormholes are made

VIOLENT UNIVERSE

Top 5 most destructive objects As ultraviolet radiation cascades down from space, Earth’s place as a life-friendly planet is under threat. The surface of our world is bathed in this high-energy radiation and it penetrates our oceans to depths of 75 metres (246 feet). The damage is catastrophic. The intense glare fries ocean plankton and those organisms which survive divert all their energy to repairing their DNA rather than photosynthesising. Oxygen levels drop as carbon dioxide levels rise. The knockout blow for many larger species comes as dwindling plankton numbers offer scant food resources, with the effect rocketing up the food chain. Thankfully this fictional future is very unlikely, but what would have caused such devastation? The answer is a gamma ray burst (GRB). They often emit as much energy…

VIOLENT UNIVERSE

As we continue to find more and more planets outside of the Solar System, one thing is becoming very obvious: there are a vast array of planets, of all sizes and orbits. We’ve found super-Earths, rocky planets bigger than Earth in habitable orbits, and hot Jupiters, gas giants in tight orbits. And now a new class of planet is coming to the fore: the super-Venus. Finding out exactly how common the array of planets in our Solar System might be has been one of the key questions for planet hunters so far. We have four relatively Earth-sized terrestrial planets, and four gas giants. But our closest planet to the Sun is Mercury, which orbits the Sun at about a third of the distance that Earth does. That, as it turns…

How Venus’ past could become Earth’s future

Could our planet turn equally barren and inhospitable?…

How Venus’ past could become Earth’s future

10 AMAZING SPACE STATION EXPERIMENTS

The International Space Station (ISS) houses an incredible array of cutting-edge research facilities, allowing scientists back on Earth to conduct pioneering experiments in space. Different space agencies, academic institutions and private companies from across the world share the onboard facilities, taking it in turns to perform their experiments. Delicate tests can be conducted in microgravity inside the station itself, and outside experiments can be exposed to vacuum and radiation. With a clear view of space and out of the reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere, the ISS is also the perfect place to investigate the universe. Some experiments investigate the physical sciences, looking at the behaviour of different materials in space, while others focus on biology, helping us to understand how the human body is affected by space travel, or how…

10 AMAZING SPACE STATION EXPERIMENTS

WHY WE LIVE IN A MULTIVERSE

Have you ever wondered how different your life would be if you had made different decisions to the ones that you had? If you had turned right instead of left? You may never know what may have been, but incredibly, all those ‘what if’ scenarios may have played out somewhere. That’s because over the past few years support for the idea that we live in a ‘multiverse’, in which our universe is just one tiny bubble among countless others, has been gaining strength. How would a multiverse arise – and just how similar, or different, would the many universes within it be? For a lot of people, the term ‘multiverse’ conjures up pictures of parallel realities, some perhaps with just a slight difference from our own. And in fact, that…

WHY WE LIVE IN A MULTIVERSE

The different types of multiverse

Level 1 Where an identical Earth exists The simplest multiverse is one that most certainly exists – the Big Bang model of cosmic origins predicts that every point in the universe has a ‘Hubble volume’ around it, limited by the expansion of the universe and the distance light has been able to travel in the 13.8 billion years since the infant universe became transparent. In practice, this means our Hubble volume is a sphere 93 billion light years across, but there are many more Hubble volumes extending far beyond what we can see. If the universe has a closed geometry, the number is limited as space curves back around on itself, but if the universe is open (as seems most likely), there may be an infinite number of Hubble…

The different types of multiverse

WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE BIG BANG?

Here’s an astounding thought – one that questions the beginning of existence itself: could there have been a time before the Big Bang? In other words, could the universe have existed before we thought it had even started? May there have even been previous universes? Such ideas, once the preserve of high-concept science fiction and philosophical debates, are gaining a new scientific credibility in the 21st century. Some cosmologists are wondering if the Big Bang was merely an intermediate phase and not the true start of the universe at all. Theories such as the ekpyrotic universe, ‘big bounce’ models and cyclic cosmology have all been around for a while, but new data from sensitive space probes could put some of these on a firmer footing. But what exactly was the…

WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE BIG BANG?

What caused the birth of the universe?

1 There was nothing Strictly speaking, no scientist believes that our universe started from literally nothing. There always has to be something to cause another action to occur. However, many cosmologists are not yet convinced that there was anything before the Big Bang. Lawrence Krauss is one such scientist and he’s developed a theory of ‘quantum nothingness’ from which the universe could have originated. The theory involves so-called 'virtual particles', which flit in and out of existence for fractions of a second in empty space. They are predicted by quantum theory and their effects can be observed. Krauss says that if you remove virtual particles from a region of space it still has an energy density – but it shouldn’t. It’s from this form of ‘nothing’ that our universe could…

What caused the birth of the universe?

“ Dark energy was discovered by looking at the light of exploding stars in faraway galaxies” What is dark energy? All About Space asks the astrophysicists “Dark energy makes up about 70 per cent of the universe. It seems to be evenly spread throughout. What we have discovered about dark energy is that it ‘pushes’, as in it repels outwards. It makes the entire universe – which is already expanding – expand faster.” Dr Karl Kruszelnicki University of Sydney “Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed. I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.”…

Dark energy vs dark matter

DARK MATTER It’s entirely invisible and neither emits or absorbs heat, light or radiation of any kind. It can be detected indirectly by its gravitational effect on normal matter and space-time. It comprises 84.54 per cent of all matter in the universe, or 26.8 per cent of the universe’s total makeup It plays a crucial role in galaxy formation and stops galaxies from flying apart. DARK ENERGY It is accelerating the expansion of space, shown by studies of supernovae in distant galaxies. It exerts a small, negative pressure that’s constant throughout space and acts against gravity. It was first discovered in the late 1990s by astronomers. It affects the shape of the universe and its large-scale structure, such as how galaxies and quasars are spread out.…

Dark energy vs dark matter

Dark energy and the future of the universe

SCENARIO 1 Expanding forever: dark energy is the same everywhere NOW In this scenario, there’s not enough gravitation to stop or slow the expansion of space. In an ever-expanding cosmos, dark energy has the same strength everywhere. FUTURE The universe continues to expand as it has been doing so; accelerating, but not so much that anything drastic happens. Stars and galaxies continue to evolve indefinitely and for an infinite amount of time. SCENARIO 2 Big Crunch or Big Rip: dark energy alters its strength NOW Many cosmologists think that dark energy could have different strengths in different parts of the universe. Having a varying ‘concentrate’ of this strange force means that there’s a continual of repulsion, even when the cosmos is expanding. A change in dark energy’s strength could explain…

Dark energy and the future of the universe

The evidence for dark energy

1 The relic radiation that fills space The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the distant, primordial microwave ‘echo’ of the universe. Measurements of the CMB taken by space probes show that the universe’s geometry is nearly flat. For that to be the case, the total amount of matter in space must tally with the average density of matter to energy in the cosmos. But measurements of the CMB spectrum show that this isn’t what’s happening – matter only accounts for 30 per cent of the density. Something is missing. 2 Exploding stars A Type Ia supernova occurs in binary systems when a white dwarf’s gravity pulls material from the other orbiting star onto itself, causing it to explode, briefly outshining all other stars in its galaxy. This means they are…

The evidence for dark energy

Dark energy mappers

Dark Energy Survey (DES) This is a visible and near-infrared survey of the universe using the four-metre (13-foot) Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The telescope has been fitted with the state-of-the-art, robotic Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which will survey 300 million extremely faint galaxies and thousands of supernovae over an eighth of the total sky. The DECam instrument will make repeated observations of certain areas of the sky in various wavelengths, as well as more longperiod observations to pick out the faintest galaxies. In this way, the DES project hopes to discover if dark energy’s density changes over time. 400 Individual scientists from the US, Spain, the UK, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland and Australia are working on DES 520 The total number of megapixels in DECam’s…

Dark energy mappers

At the peak of the space race in 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey gave life to the space future that many people expected lay ahead. The story began with a Pan-Am Orion III space plane carrying passengers to a giant rotating space station in Earth orbit. It’s a sleek, white, delta-winged craft that looks like a cross between Concorde and the Space Shuttle, and provides airline-like travel directly into Earth orbit. Of course, space travel did not continue to develop at the same rate, and even the Space Shuttle failed to deliver cheap routine access to space, let alone in-flight entertainment and steward refreshment services. Now, however, a new generation of projects are bringing the space plane from the pages of science fiction and into reality, and these…

Droids on another world

The word robot comes from the Czech word robota, meaning slave; and it was created for Rossum’s Universal Robots, a play first performed in Prague in 1921. It featured humanoid robots produced to do humanity’s drudgery and their eventual rebellion; it proved a worldwide success and gave us the word and the classic science fiction robot. Robots are now an integral part of most futuristic space fiction, yet reality has both far exceeded expectations and somewhat underwhelmed. Robotic spacecraft have touched down on six different bodies, driven around on the Moon and Mars and reached interstellar space. But classic science fiction humanoid robots have been in short supply. Fortunately, NASA is actually working on making them our new helpers in space. When the International Space Station (ISS) was still in…

Droids on another world

INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL + how to become a space tourist

As the spacecraft approaches the planet, things seem quite familiar. Sunlight glints off an expanse of blue ocean, and white clouds are corralled by gusts of wind. But a closer inspection is jarring – the continents are all in the wrong place. That’s because, for all its similarities, this isn’t the Earth. Instead, we’re looking at the first historic images sent back of another world orbiting a star far beyond the Sun. In days gone by, such ideas were little more than a pipe dream. But the tide, it seems, is turning. Back in April, Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner launched their Breakthrough Starshot project to an enthralled press conference. Their goal is to one day fire lasers at sails strapped to tiny stamp-sized spacecraft, launching a…

INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL + how to become a space tourist

Interstellar road map

THE LOCATIONS Alpha Centauri Distance from Earth: 4.37 light years Current travel time: 30,000 years Interstellar speed travel time: 43 years This three-star system includes Proxima Centauri, which is the nearest star to Earth after the Sun. It is believed there may be planets around these stars. Barnard’s Star Distance from Earth: 5.96 light years Current travel time: 42,500 years Interstellar speed travel time: 60 years One of the fastest moving stars in the galaxy, this is also the closest star to Earth (after the Sun) that is visible from the Northern Hemisphere. Wolf 359 Distance from Earth: 7.78 light years Current travel time: 55,500 years Interstellar speed travel time: 78 years This red dwarf is located in the constellation of Leo and it can only be seen through a…

Interstellar road map

“There would be no violent launch, just electric motors gently lifting you into space” Riding the elevator The tether provides a physical link for the climbers to journey into space. Most likely the tether will be a ribbon shape and the climbers will simply clamp on and drive up it with rollers. Power could be provided through a carbon tether from solar panels on the counterweight, or carry solar panels lit by ground based lasers. The climbers would travel at about 200km/h (124mph), taking 7.5 days to reach GEO, making for a very different launch experience. A space elevator is the idea of building a lift connecting the ground to Earth orbit. The first person to consider it was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (who was the first to set out the equations…

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