Credit: ESA, J. Whatmore

From the fires of a sun’s birth, twin planets emerged; Venus, and Earth. Two roads diverged in our young solar system. Nature draped one world in the greens and blues of life while enveloping the other in acid clouds, high heat, and volcanic flows. Why did Venus take such a disastrous turn? And what light can Earth's sister planet shed on the search for other worlds like our own? For as long as we have gazed upon the stars they have offered few signs that somewhere a world's as rich and diverse as our own. Recently though, astronomers have found ways to see into the bright lights of nearby stars. They've been discovering planets at a rapid pace using orbiting observatories like NASA's Kepler space telescope, and an array of ground-based instruments. The count is almost a thousand and rising.

Watch video: Venus Death of a Planet:


YouTube video from Real Space

These alien worlds run the gamut from great gas giants many times the size of our Jupiter to rocky charred remnants that burned when their planet star exploded. Some have wild elliptical orbits swinging far out into space then diving into scorching stellar winds. Still others orbit so close to their parent stars that their surfaces are likely bathed in molten rock. Amid these hostile realms, a few bear tantalizing hints of water or ice. Ingredients needed to nurture life as we know it. The race to find other Earths has raised anew the ancient question whether out in the folds of our galaxy, planets like our own are abundant, and life, commonplace or whether Earth is a rare Garden of Eden in a barren universe. With so little direct evidence of these other worlds to go on, we have only the stories of planets within our own solar system to gauge the chances of finding another Earth. Consider for example, a world that has long had the look and feel of a life-bearing planet. Except for the Moon, there's no brighter light in our night skies than the planet Venus known as both the morning and the evening star.

Also see "Why can't we live on Venus?":
https://www.howitworksdaily.com/why-cant-we-live-on-venus/

Image credit: Scientific Mystery

Have you ever thought about what might happen if you or an astronaut accidentally drifted into Saturn's atmosphere?

Watch this video to understand the results of your great (and final) fall:

 
YouTube video by V101 Science

It would not be a pleasant free fall into Saturn's atmosphere when you consider the following:

"Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 1,600 feet per second (500 meters per second) in the equatorial region. In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about 360 feet per second (110 meters per second). And the pressure—the same kind you feel when you dive deep underwater—is so powerful it squeezes gas into liquid.

Saturn's north pole has an interesting atmospheric feature—a six-sided jet stream. This hexagon-shaped pattern was first noticed in images from the Voyager I spacecraft and has been more closely observed by the Cassini spacecraft since. Spanning about 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) across, the hexagon is a wavy jet stream of 200-mile-per-hour winds (about 322 kilometers per hour) with a massive, rotating storm at the center. There is no weather feature like it anywhere else in the solar system."

After all the intense, chilly wind and encountering air pressure 2 to 4 times more intense than Earth's, you would then enter the surface which isn't actually a surface. The outcome would not be very pleasant whether you were in a spacesuit, or even in a spacecraft:

"As a gas giant, Saturn doesn’t have a true surface. The planet is mostly swirling gases and liquids deeper down. While a spacecraft would have nowhere to land on Saturn, it wouldn’t be able to fly through unscathed either. The extreme pressures and temperatures deep inside the planet crush, melt and vaporize spacecraft trying to fly into the planet."

The pressures and temperatures you'd encounter would obliterate you, no doubt. My advice is to never attempt to free fall on Saturn. :) It would be a much better trip if you simply orbited Saturn to view its rings, its gaseous horizon, and its aurorae.

References
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/saturn/in-depth/
https://www.labroots.com/trending/videos/11162/here-s-what-would-happen-if-you-fell-into-saturn-s-atmosphere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGaW-c7T4f8 (URL to the above video)

Credit: ListVerse

Viruses, which can contain DNA or RNA, are some of the most mysterious organisms on Earth. It’s not known with certainty whether they are living organisms or not. Scientists for the first time ever have discovered a virus that has no recognizable genes, making it a real oddball compared to all other known viruses. Of course, not all viruses are known, but more are being discovered daily. A different research group has just discovered thousands of new viruses inside the tissues of dozens of animals.

The discovery makes researchers question how much they really know about viruses. Jônatas Abrahão, a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte stated this finding speaks volumes on “how much we still need to understand” about viruses.

Mr. Abrahão made his discovery while he was hunting looking for giant viruses. The microbes, some of which are the size of bacteria, were first discovered inside amoebae back in 2003 in a local artificial lake. Abrahão and his colleagues found new giant viruses, but they also discovered a virus that because of its small size was very much unlike most that typically infect amoebae. They named the newly discovered virus Yaravirus.

The size of this virus wasn’t the only oddity about it. Once the team sequenced its genome, none of its genes matched any genes scientists had come across before. Unusual viruses don't surprise Elodie Ghedin of New York University very much. Ghedin spends much of his time looking for viruses in wastewater and in respiratory systems. She said that 95% of the viruses in sewage data have "no matches to reference genomes [in databases]. We seem to be discovering new viruses all the time."

While Abrahão was chasing down viruses, Christopher Buck and graduate student Michael Tisza, virologists at the National Cancer Institute, were searching in a much wider area such as in animal tissues for circular viruses including papillomaviruses. One of the human papillomaviruses can cause cervical cancer, and another similar virus is usually harmless to people, but not always. Buck has found evidence some may be linked to bladder cancer in patients with kidney transplants.

The viruses were found by isolating viral particles from many dozens of tissue samples from humans and animals, and they were screened for circular genomes. The team discovered nearly 2500 circular viruses, 600 of which are completely new to scientists. It’s still unclear what impact these microbes may or may not have on human health, the team reported in eLife. Buck says the data should help doctors and scientists begin to make the connections on the impact they may have on human health.

It's know that while some viruses cause disease, some live in the human body may actually help keep us healthy. Other viruses are essential for keeping ecosystems running smoothly by helping to recycle essential nutrients. Curtis Suttle, and environmental virologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver says that the bottom line is we could not survive without them.

References
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/scientists-discover-virus-no-recognizable-genes
https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/02/07/2212231/scientists-discover-virus-with-no-recognizable-genes
https://thefloridaoracle.com/scientists-discover-virus-with-no-recognizable-genes/

An animation of Solar Orbiter peering at the Sun through peepholes in its heat shield. 
Credits: ESA/ATG medialab

(NASA) It will be a dark winter’s night when Solar Orbiter launches from Florida on its journey to the source of all light on Earth, the Sun.
The mission, a collaboration between ESA (the European Space Agency) and NASA, is scheduled to begin Feb. 9, 2020, during a two-hour launch window that opens at 11:03 p.m. EST. The two-ton spacecraft launches from Cape Canaveral on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

Seeking a view of the Sun’s north and south poles, Solar Orbiter will journey out of the ecliptic plane — the belt of space, roughly aligned with the Sun’s equator, through which the planets orbit. Slinging past Earth and repeatedly around Venus, the spacecraft will draw near the Sun and climb higher above the ecliptic until it has a bird’s eye view of the poles.

There, Solar Orbiter will try to answer basic questions about the Sun, whose every burp and breeze holds sway over the solar system. What drives the solar wind, the gust of charged particles constantly blowing from the Sun? Or, what churning deep inside the Sun generates its magnetic field? How does the Sun’s magnetic field shape the heliosphere, the vast bubble of space dominated by our star?

“These questions are not new,” said Yannis Zouganelis, ESA deputy project scientist at the European Space Astronomy Centre in Madrid. “We still don’t understand fundamental things about our star.” 

In solving these mysteries, scientists seek to better understand how the Sun shapes space weather, the conditions in space that can impact astronauts, satellites, and everyday technology like radio and GPS.

Over the next seven years, Solar Orbiter will travel as close as 26 million miles to the Sun — closing about two-thirds the distance from Earth to the star. It will climb 24 degrees above the ecliptic for a vista of the poles and the far side of the Sun.

“We don’t know what we’re going to see,” said Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla, NASA deputy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Our view of the Sun is going to change a lot in the next few years.”

Enabling its scorching voyage is a heat shield sporting a black coating of calcium phosphate, a charcoal-like powder similar to pigments used in cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago. All but one of the spacecraft’s telescopes peer through holes in the heat shield. At closest approach, the front of the shield will near 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the instruments tucked behind it will remain at a comfortable range — for them — between minus 4 F and 122 F above zero.

Because Earth orbits through the ecliptic plane, we don’t get a good view of the poles from afar. It’s a bit like trying to glimpse Mount Everest’s summit from the base of the mountain. Crucially, the poles are still missing from space weather models that scientists use to forecast solar activity.

Animation of a portion of Solar Orbiter's highly inclined orbit. Credits: ESA/ATG medialab

Like Earth’s own North and South poles, the Sun’s poles are extreme regions quite different from the rest of the Sun. They’re covered in coronal holes, cooler stretches where the fast solar wind comes gushing from. There, scientists hope to find the footprints of knotted magnetic fields underlying solar activity. Many think the poles hold the first clues to the intensity of the next solar cycle, which comes roughly every 11 years, as the Sun swings from seasons of high to low activity.

With a powerful array of 10 instruments, Solar Orbiter is like a lab in orbit, designed to study the Sun and its outbursts in great detail.

“What makes Solar Orbiter unique is this combination of really high-resolution imagers and in situ instruments, getting perspectives we haven’t seen yet,” said Daniel Müller, ESA project scientist at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands.

Ideally, Müller said, Solar Orbiter will image where solar wind bubbles on the surface and study the properties of that gust of wind as it flows from the Sun and passes the spacecraft. For the first time, scientists will be able to map what comes out of the Sun to precisely where it came from.

The instruments are also designed to work in concert, enhancing their observing power, said ESA payload manager Anne Pacros. When something fleeting like an X-ray solar flare blazes on the surface, the spacecraft’s X-ray instrument will see, and alert the others to pay attention.

“They enter burst mode, where they take more data, faster, responding to solar activity in real time,” Pacros said. “This promises much more science with what we have on board.”

Solar Orbiter’s destination is largely uncharted, a little-explored region of the heliosphere. Its unique vantage point is key to a complete understanding of the Sun’s activity and cycles. By offering regular views of the far side of the Sun, and the first images of the solar poles, Solar Orbiter joins a team of NASA heliophysics missions seeking to understand how the Sun affects the space around Earth and all the planets.

“We have all these amazing missions located in exactly the right place we want to study,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “They’re in places that allow us to do big system science, more science than you could do with just one mission alone.”

In particular, Solar Orbiter will work closely with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. The two are natural teammates. Together, they’ll provide a never-before-seen global view of our star.

The duo makes new multi-point measurements possible; these are useful for tracking how flows from the Sun develop and change. As Parker Solar Probe samples hot solar gases up close, Solar Orbiter can tell us more about the very space Parker flies through. Or, they might simultaneously image the same structure in the corona, the solar atmosphere, sharing views from the poles and equator. At various points, the two missions will make coordinated observations.

“Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter, in orbit together, is a big milestone,” Nieves-Chinchilla said. “This is something heliophysicists have been waiting on for decades. In the next decade, together, the two will be sure to change the field.”

After launch, the operations team will conduct three months of commissioning to ensure the instruments are operating properly. Once this check-out period is complete, the in situ instruments will turn on; the remote-sensing instruments will remain in cruising mode until Solar Orbiter’s first solar approach in November 2021.

Solar Orbiter is an international cooperative mission between ESA and NASA. ESA's European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands manages the development effort. The European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Germany will operate Solar Orbiter after launch. Solar Orbiter was built by Airbus Defence and Space, and contains 10 instruments: nine provided by ESA member states and ESA. NASA provided one instrument, SoloHI and an additional sensor, the Heavy Ion Sensor, which is part of the Solar Wind Analyzer (SWA) instrument suite.

For more information, please visit:
https://nasa.gov/solarorbiter