If the Ingenuity helicopter would fly at night on Mars, its very possible the whirring rotors would create enough static electricity in the extremely dry Martian atmosphere to cause the air around the craft to glow.
“The faint glow would be most visible during evening hours when the background sky is darker,” said William Farrell, from Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of a paper on this topic. “NASA’s experimental Ingenuity helicopter does not fly during this time, but future drones could be cleared for evening flight and look for this glow.”
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter can be seen hovering during its third flight on April 25, 2021, as seen by the left Navigation Camera aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
If you’ve ever shuffled your feet across a wool carpet on a dry winter day, and then reached out to touch a metal doorknob, you’re familiar with the static discharge that creates a little zap — a spark — that leaps between your fingers and the metal knob.
On Earth, this static discharge is usually just an annoyance. But on Mars, anything “rubbing” against the uber-dry atmosphere – and even the dry soil — can create a phenomenon called triboelectric charging.
When certain pairs of materials, such as a carpet and your shoes rub together, one material gives up some of its electrons to the other material. The separation of charge can create an electric field. This process also occurs naturally at much larger scales on Earth as a corona or electrical glow sometimes seen on aircraft and ships in electrical storms known as Saint Elmo’s Fire.
Although the currents generated by a drone or tiny helicopter like Ingenuity are really small, Farrell said they might be large enough to cause the air around the blades and other parts of the craft to glow a blue-purple color.
“The electric currents generated by the fast-rotating blades on drones are too small to be a threat to the craft or the Martian environment,” he said in a press release, “but they offer an opportunity to do some additional science to improve our understanding of an accumulation of …. triboelectric charging.”
The paper, “Will the Mars Helicopter Induce Local Martian Atmospheric Breakdown?” was published in March 2021 in the Planetary Science Journal.
An animated gif of the Perseverance rover looking at the Ingenuity helicopter. Credit: NASA/JPL
There has been concern about triboelectric charging because on Mars and the Moon, conditions are ideal for this to occur, especially in the soil. The soil is drier than desert sand on Earth, and when materials used on rover wheels – such as aluminum or steel – rub against the soil, it could create enough electric charge to create problems for the craft’s electronics. Therefore, grounding systems have been developed to counteract the issue.
But Ferrell and his team looked at the possibility of this happening for drones or rotocraft on Mars, as well, due to the dryness of the air, as well as the propensity of dust within the Martian air.
The team applied laboratory measurements and used computer modeling to investigate how electric charge could build up on a drone’s rotor blades. They found that as the drone’s blades spin, they can run into the tiny dust grains in the Martian air, especially when the helicopter is near the surface and blowing dust around.
As the blades impact the grains, charge is transferred, building up on the blades and creating an electric field. As charge builds to high levels, the atmosphere starts to conduct electricity, a process known as “atmospheric breakdown,” creating a population of electrons that form an enhanced electric current that acts to dissipate or
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Starship gave us quite a show during the first flight test of a fully integrated Starship (S24) and Super Heavy rocket (B7) from Starbase in Texas.
On April 20, 2023 at 8:33 a.m. CT, Starship successfully lifted off from the orbital launch pad for the first time. The vehicle cleared the pad and beach as Starship climbed to an apogee of ~39 km over the Gulf of Mexico – the highest of any Starship to-date.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship.
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This is the vehicle trajectory and mission control audio without any additional commentary. There may be very long periods of silence. For our full hosted webcast, visit
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https://mansbrand.com/when-black-holes-merge-theyll-ring-like-a-bell/
When two black holes collide, they don’t smash into each other the way two stars might. A black hole is an intensely curved region of space that can be described by only its mass, rotation, and electric charge, so two black holes release violent gravitational ripples as merge into a single black hole. The new black hole continues to emit gravitational waves until it settles down into a simple rotating black hole. That settling down period is known as the ring down, and its pattern holds clues to some of the deepest mysteries of gravitational physics.
Gravitational wave observatories such as the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have mostly focused on the inspiral period of black hole mergers. This is the period where the two black holes orbit ever closer to each other, creating a rhythmic stream of strong gravitational waves. From this astronomers can determine the mass and rotation of the original black holes, as well as the mass and rotation of the merged black hole. The pattern of gravitational waves we observe is governed by Einstein’s general relativity equations, and by matching observation to theory we learn about black holes.
General relativity describes gravity extremely well. Of all the gravitational tests we’ve done, they all agree with general relativity. But Einstein’s theory doesn’t play well with the other extremely accurate physical theory, quantum mechanics. Because of this, physicists have proposed modifications to general relativity that are more compatible with quantum theory. Under these modified theories, there are subtle differences in the way merged black holes ring down, but observing those differences hasn’t been possible. But a couple of new studies show how we might be able to observe them in the next LIGO run.
The modified Teukolsky equation. Credit: Li, Dongjun, et al
In the first work, the team focused on what is known as the Teukolsky Equation. First proposed by Saul Teukolsky, the equations are an efficient way of analyzing gravitational waves. The equations only apply to classical general relativity, so the team developed a way to modify the equations for modified general relativity models. Since the solutions to both the Teukolsky and modified Teukolsky equations don’t require a massive supercomputer to solve, the team can compare black hole ring downs in various gravitational models.
The second work looks at how this would be done with LIGO data. Rather than focusing on general differences, this work focuses on what is known as the no-hair theorem. General relativity predicts that no matter how two black holes merge, the final merged black hole must be described by only mass, rotation, and charge. It can’t have any “hair”, or remnant features of the collision. In some modified versions of general relativity, black holes can have certain features, which would violate the no-hair theorem. In this second work, the authors show how this could be used to test general relativity against certain modified theories.
LIGO has just begun its latest observation run, so it will be a while before there is enough data to test. But we may soon have a new observational test of Einstein’s old theory, and we might just prove it isn’t the final theory of gravity after all.
Reference: Li, Dongjun, et al. “Perturbations of spinning black holes beyond General Relativity: Modified Teukolsky equation.” Physical Review X 13.2 (2022): 021029.
Reference: Ma, Sizheng, Ling Sun, and Yanbei Chen. “Black hole spectroscopy by mode cleaning.” Physical Review Letters 130.2 (2023): 141401.
The post When Black Holes Merge, They’ll Ring Like a Bell appeared first on Universe Today.
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