Sep 30, 2020 03:00 AM
The space station air leak mystery just got even weirder
https://bgr.com/2020/09/29/space-station-leak-iss/
SUMMARY POINTS: The International Space Station sprung a leak many weeks ago and NASA has yet to find out exactly where it is. The leak appeared to get worse on Monday night, but NASA now says that may have been due to a temperature change. The crew has isolated it to one module, but haven’t found the source of the leak yet... (MORE - details)
Did a migrating Jupiter turn Venus into hell?
https://www.space.com/migrating-jupiter-...-into-hell
EXCERPT: ... it's clear that the giant planets first formed much farther out, then migrated inward closer to the sun. [...] in other models, Jupiter jumps almost to the orbit of Mars before slinking back out to its present position. ... according to a recent paper appearing in the preprint journal arXiv, if Jupiter happened to migrate inward closer to the sun, it could have tugged Venus into an extremely elliptical orbit...
[...] If you're a planet trying to hold on to your liquid water oceans, an eccentric orbit is a real pain in the neck. We already know from studies of Earth's own history that variations in our planet's eccentricity (due to, you guessed it, gravitational tweaks and tugs from the other planets) triggered ice ages and glaciation events. Indeed, some deep-time climate variations are directly connected to changes in our eccentricity.
But still, despite the occasional frozen moment, Earth has been able to hang on to its water. Poor Venus suffered a worse fate, however. If Venus got sent into a highly elliptical orbit due to the presence of Jupiter in the early days of the solar system, it spent some of its year far away from the sun (nice and cool) and some of its year way too close for comfort.
All told, the researchers calculate, Venus may have suffered from more heat exposure than is healthy. The problem is that radiation intensity increases rapidly for even small inward shifts in orbital position. The more time that Venus spent closer to the sun, the worse it suffered.
Even worse, the closer Venus was to the sun, the more it was susceptible to ultraviolet radiation blasts from solar flares, which were especially prominent when our sun was a young upstart.
The combination of increased heat and increased exposure to high-energy radiation set in motion Venus' downward, hellish spiral. As Venus lost its oceans, the water vapor in the atmosphere trapped heat. The trapped heat caused more water to evaporate, which put more water in the atmosphere, which trapped more heat, and round and round it went in a vicious greenhouse cycle.
With no liquids to lubricate Venus' joints, plate tectonics stopped, allowing carbon dioxide to leak into the atmosphere to dramatic excess, locking in its fate. Eventually, Venus turned itself inside out and cooked itself to death, leaving our neighbor a nightmare world. And it may have been accelerated on that path by a wandering, plundering Jupiter.... (MORE - details)
https://bgr.com/2020/09/29/space-station-leak-iss/
SUMMARY POINTS: The International Space Station sprung a leak many weeks ago and NASA has yet to find out exactly where it is. The leak appeared to get worse on Monday night, but NASA now says that may have been due to a temperature change. The crew has isolated it to one module, but haven’t found the source of the leak yet... (MORE - details)
Did a migrating Jupiter turn Venus into hell?
https://www.space.com/migrating-jupiter-...-into-hell
EXCERPT: ... it's clear that the giant planets first formed much farther out, then migrated inward closer to the sun. [...] in other models, Jupiter jumps almost to the orbit of Mars before slinking back out to its present position. ... according to a recent paper appearing in the preprint journal arXiv, if Jupiter happened to migrate inward closer to the sun, it could have tugged Venus into an extremely elliptical orbit...
[...] If you're a planet trying to hold on to your liquid water oceans, an eccentric orbit is a real pain in the neck. We already know from studies of Earth's own history that variations in our planet's eccentricity (due to, you guessed it, gravitational tweaks and tugs from the other planets) triggered ice ages and glaciation events. Indeed, some deep-time climate variations are directly connected to changes in our eccentricity.
But still, despite the occasional frozen moment, Earth has been able to hang on to its water. Poor Venus suffered a worse fate, however. If Venus got sent into a highly elliptical orbit due to the presence of Jupiter in the early days of the solar system, it spent some of its year far away from the sun (nice and cool) and some of its year way too close for comfort.
All told, the researchers calculate, Venus may have suffered from more heat exposure than is healthy. The problem is that radiation intensity increases rapidly for even small inward shifts in orbital position. The more time that Venus spent closer to the sun, the worse it suffered.
Even worse, the closer Venus was to the sun, the more it was susceptible to ultraviolet radiation blasts from solar flares, which were especially prominent when our sun was a young upstart.
The combination of increased heat and increased exposure to high-energy radiation set in motion Venus' downward, hellish spiral. As Venus lost its oceans, the water vapor in the atmosphere trapped heat. The trapped heat caused more water to evaporate, which put more water in the atmosphere, which trapped more heat, and round and round it went in a vicious greenhouse cycle.
With no liquids to lubricate Venus' joints, plate tectonics stopped, allowing carbon dioxide to leak into the atmosphere to dramatic excess, locking in its fate. Eventually, Venus turned itself inside out and cooked itself to death, leaving our neighbor a nightmare world. And it may have been accelerated on that path by a wandering, plundering Jupiter.... (MORE - details)