Space News November 2020

 Just for fun:  Alien art installation in Utah.  About a year ago someone placed a polished monolith in a remote desert location.  Fun if it really were aliens.

There's possible evidence of an active volcano on  the Tharsis volanic plateau of Mars.  A smudge showed up on a Mars photo October 22nd that wasn't there a few days earlier.  Spacenews.com October 25th

From Japan comes a detailed study of the last magnetic pole reversal of Earth about the time our species started moving out of Africa.  Sea sediments were studied in unprecedented detail.  A major finding is the change may have taken twenty thousand years with a long period of instability leading up. 

Planetary atmospheric surprises:  Recent years have brought photographic records of new phenomena:  Sprites and ELVES, gravity waves in clouds, STEVE and now reported this month, "little green cannonballs" on the edge of STEVE.

A meteor, 2020 VT4  the size of a small house,  scooted by Earth November 13th and was discovered the next day.  5-11 meter diameter, not big enough to alarm people but you wouldn't want it landing in your neighbourhood.  It passed below the space station orbit.

Sodium tail on Mercury:  A nice photo was published of the sodium trail, like the tail of a comet, that tags along with Mercury on the away side. It's a composite with filters, made dramatic by including trees peripheral to the view.

There's been progress looking for evidence of past supernovas that impacted earth.  A 3% spike in Carbon-14 is considered a strong signature.  Brakenridge tried to match four known events of the last  40,000 years with the patched together record of tree growth rings.  There was a correlation but the time signatures were too fuzzy to brag about.

NASA is putting together plans for a radio telescope on the far side of the moon.  It would be a wire mesh shape following the contour of an existing dish-like crater.   Great idea, anticipated years ago by Heinlein and made more appealing as the Arecibo observatory is being shut down without a funding plan to safely rebuild the suspension cables.   NASA has asked for proposals to set up a nuclear power plant on the moon and on Mars with the moon one ready to launch in 2026. .  Of course!    And China launched a mission this week to bring back a couple kg of moon samples.  What struck me is the plan to dig down up to six feet.

Buried "cave" in Antarctica:  This story is probably an artifact of the pixels but the possibility of a large unexplained opening to an underground void exists.  The NY Post includes a chatty 11 minute video clip that has some striking google earth imagery.

Hubble has a photo of one galaxy falling like a waterfall into the middle of a larger one.

Crazy but likely true:  

An asteroid trailing Mars appears to be a chunk blasted from our own moon.

The group of "Trojan" asteroids that trail along after Mars orbit has one rock whose spectral image doesn't belong.  "The spectrum of this particular asteroid seems to be almost a dead-ringer for parts of the Moon where there is exposed bedrock such as crater interiors and mountains," explains AOP astrochemist Galin Borisov.

First ever rogue planet found drifting through our galaxy without a home star.  The moment you think of it, it's obvious there will be many more to find.  This one was found by gravitational micro-lensing, tiny blips in the light of some stars it passed in front of.  Estimated size is close to that of mother Earth.

Tunguska explosion update:  Evidence is stronger that it was a near miss by a meteor twice the length of a football field

October report in Forbes:  No extra-terrestrial debris has ever been found from the 1908 event that flattened trees over an immense area.  It was seen over a distance of 700 km which rules out an ice object that would have vaporized.  The Siberian Federal University did computer simulations that ruled out ice and estimated the object's size.  There were a series of air bursts that left high atmospheric dust explaining glowing clouds reported later in Europe.