NASA’s InSight Mars lander keeps daily records of weather conditions at the Elysium Planitia landing site on the red planet. Last week saw daytime highs from 8 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit; lows fell to -139 degrees.

Mars doesn’t have months like we have months though. Our concept is based on a lunar orbit. Mars’ moons orbit much faster – Phobos every 8 hours, Deimos every 30 hours; so well over 2,000 orbits per 30 day ‘month’ for Phobos and over 500 orbits per ‘month’ for Deimos.

InSight landed Nov. 2018 on a two-year mission to better understand the interior of Mars using both surface and drilling geophysical sensors.

Turning to night sky highlights this week:

Stardust discovered in a meteorite that landed in Australia more than 50 years ago is up to three billion years older than our solar system.

Turning to the night sky – Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are still aligned in the 6:00 am predawn sky in the east.

Today is Galileo’s 456th birth anniversary. His iconoclastic reputation overshadows his basic raison d’etre at the time – to make a buck. He was a struggling teacher who worked in the ‘gig economy’ of Renaissance Italy. Galileo wasn’t born to a high place in society; he wasn’t a politician, his parents were not rich and his father actually wanted his son to become a physician. He really wanted to be a mathematician. He eventually ditched medical school and became a university math instructor where he began to investigate physics of motion.

A colleague informed him of a new optic device he’d seen. After a bit of research, Galileo figured out how others were making these new optic devices and using his math skills, made a better one. He immediately saw the how this invention could get him hired by a wealthy and influential patron to whom he sold the manufacturing rights. He got a better university appointment and didn’t have to teach classes, so he could pursue his research interests.

Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs (first detected in 2007) are intermittent, ubiquitous, low frequency, very high energy, speedy pulses of radio energy. They are considered unusual because of the power – very intense and very brief – just milliseconds – and seemingly from billions of light years away – translate as from very far off, hence very old. To date only a few dozen have been seen but their origin is a mystery.

Recently, astronomers using a Canadian radio telescope have found one with a repeating 16-day pattern and have pinpointed its point of origin in a relatively nearby spiral galaxy. First, astronomers have several possibilities they refer to for origin of phenomena like this but these FRBs don’t fit the pattern of any of the known source types. Second, they are very energetic and seem to come from outside our galaxy, sometimes from halfway across the universe. Being so bright the source phenomena must be powerful because the FRBs outshine any other source in the sky except the sun – albeit for just a millisecond.

Starting on Sunday morning and all this week at 6:00 am, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will appear in a diagonal line upper right to lower left; the moon marches past each planet starting Monday – Tuesday at Mars, Wednesday above Jupiter, Thursday at Saturn, done by Friday.

Astronomers observing white dwarf stars see spectrographic signatures of previously orbiting gas giant planets. Our gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) will possibly do the same – leave signatures of their existence on our White Dwarf sun long after all the inner planets are gone and the outer planets are transformed. Not to worry – this won’t happen for some eight billion years.

Bid adieu to the Spitzer Space Telescope! Named after astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer (in 1965 he first proposed what would later become the Hubble Space Telescope), the Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in 2003. Expected to last just 2.5 years, Spitzer continued generating good science results until it was finally turned off last month (after it ran out of coolant), an amazing 16 years after it launched. Dusty stellar nurseries, extrasolar planets, centers of galaxies, and newly forming planetary systems hidden behind thick curtains of cosmic dust would remain unseen without Spitzer’s unique heat-detecting capability.

From 6:15 a.m. – 6:30 a.m., Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, and the bright star Antares are all visible.

In the west at 6:00 p.m., bright Mercury is at its greatest height for this cycle. A clear view of the horizon and binoculars will help you catch it.

49ers, Chiefs & Punxsutawney Phil

Extreme Global Warming! – Different process altogether from Earth.

The Night Sky

Saturn’s tracking a little behind Jupiter but not high enough to catch before sunrise – just yet.

Venus rules the west however at 6:00 pm, the tiny but bright Mercury is sneaking up from the west a bit each day, reaching up toward Venus.

The dim red star Proxima Centauri, 4.2 lightyears from Earth, is known to have an EarthPlus-planet in the star’s habitable zone. Now a second planet has been detected, but this one is 5.8 times the mass of our planet and orbits its star only once every five years. Unfortunately, it’s also too far from the cool star to be warm enough for liquid water. So, it’s not habitable – at least for us.

–When totaling up all the matter in the universe, cosmologists believe that about 80% of the mass of the universe is completely unseen dark matter, 21% is dark energy and just 4% is all the actual matter of the universe. According to all the mass of the universe that can be accounted for, the universe’s rate of expansion, left over after the universe’s inflation period, should indicate a gradual decrease in that expansion rate – the expansion should be slowing. But it isn’t. In fact, it’s accelerating!

The Moon and Mars are visible early this week in the 6:15 – 6:30 a.m. window in the East. Jupiter is now very low in the east at 6:30 a.m. Yes, that’s Venus in the south-west after sunset. It’ll be there for a few months, getting brighter and higher.

Supernovae are known as element factories, but astronomers are now discovering that merging neutron stars and fast-spinning supernovae may also be capable of creating variants of the elements heavier than iron. Heavy elements are created through nuclear fusion.

Venus shines in the west after sunset. Mars brightens up the east at 6:00am for sunrise, now sliding towards Antares of Scorpius. Good opportunity to compare the two.

Could the concept of ‘dark energy’ all be a big mistake? Next week, Skytalk examines new data showing that the key assumption made in the discovery of dark energy is in error.

This year’s highlights in the world of astronomy include:

1) An image of the shadow of a black hole resembles an ‘orange doughnut.’ A supermassive Black Hole was seen in silhouette against the background of its surrounding accretion disk.

2) Liquid water is identified at Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

3) The New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2016, then flew past an even more distant object on New Year’s Day 2019 – a double-lobed Kuiper Belt object now known as Arrokoth. Its shape resembles the BB-8 droid from the recent ‘Star Wars’ chapters. It features a small circle atop a larger circle, except it’s flattened.

Assessing the night sky: Venus and the Moon are visible tonight in the southwest just after sunset.

We’ve arrived at the point in our solar orbit where the number of hours of sunlight are at a minimum for us in the North, and and conversely at a maximum for those in the Southern hemisphere.

Hanukkah begins tomorrow at sunset, Christmas Day is Wednesday, and the first day of Kwanzaa is Thursday the 26th.

SpaceX will coat one side of a satellite to reduce brightness interference when observing from Earth. They intend to test one unit on the next deployment.

There will be thousands of Starlink satellites joining the already tens of thousands of pieces of space junk. We need to develop a plan to clean up and fast! The European Space Agency will test a ‘space grab’ tech to start to clean up space. ‘Clear Space-1’ is designed to reach a dead satellite, grab it, and drag it down into a fiery re-entry destruction. So it’s slow and expensive, but it’s an emerging business as the future will certainly see an enormous increase in satellites.

Anniversaries of note:

On this date in 1972, Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan becomes the last human to walk on the moon.

It was just 66 years from the Wright brothers first powered flight to the last human on the moon!