Professor Michel Mayor, the scientist who led the team that identified the first extrasolar planet in 1995, believes a planet similar in size and composition to Earth will soon be found.
Prof Mayor, of Geneva University, said that the prospect of finding a planet habitable for humans had come a step closer through rapid technological advances allowing observation of planets outside the solar system.
Addressing a Royal Society conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme, he said: “The search for twins of Earth is motivated by the ultimate prospect of finding sites with favourable conditions for the development of life. Read the full story
Scientists have detected a flash of light from across the Galaxy so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The flash was brighter than anything ever detected from beyond our Solar System and lasted over a tenth of a second. NASA and European satellites and many radio telescopes detected the flash and its aftermath on December 27, 2004. Two science teams report about this event at a special press event today at NASA headquarters. A multitude of papers are planned for publication.
The mammoth chunk of ice, which measures 12 miles long and five miles wide, was spotted floating close to the mainland by scientists at the Australian Antarctic Division (ADD).
Known as B17B, it is currently drifting 1,000 miles from Australia’s west coast and is moving gradually north with the ocean current and prevailing wind.
BANGALORE: After water, it’s magnet . Chandrayaan-1 has discovered and confirmed for the first time the presence of magnetic spheres on the side of the moon—the side we cannot see from the earth. This could theoretically mean a longer and secure stay for astronauts on moon.
There had been speculation for long but the confirmation was made by Sara, the instrument jointly made by Isro, European Space Agency and Sweden. The findings by Sara, not yet published, were made known by top scientists on the sidelines of the platinum jubilee celebrations of the Indian Academy of Sciences at IISC. The discovery of magnetic forces comes after the discovery of water molecules by M3—the Nasa instrument on Chandrayaan-1. Read the full story
One of the best annual meteor showers will peak in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday, and for some skywatchers the show could be quite impressive.
The best seats are in Asia, but North American observers should be treated to an above average performance of the Leonid meteor shower, weather permitting. The trick for all observers is to head outside in the wee hours of the morning – between 1 a.m. and dawn – regardless where you live.
The Leonids put on a solid show every year, if skies are clear and moonlight does not interfere. This year the moon is near its new phase, and not a factor. For anyone in the Northern Hemisphere with dark skies, away from urban and suburban lighting, the show should be worth getting up early to see. Read the full story
Declaring “this is not your father’s moon,” NASA scientists said today that last month’s mission to punch a hole in the lunar surface found significant amounts of water in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole.
“The moon is alive,” declared Anthony Colaprete, the chief scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission.
According to Colaprete and other researchers, the mission measured about 25 gallons of water in the form of vapor and ice after punching a hole about 100 feet across in the surface of the moon. While that’s not enough to fill a bathtub, it could be evidence there is enough water at the poles for future astronauts to use to live off the land. And it’s far more than anyone expected following the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s, which pronounced the moon a dead, forbidding world.
“This is painting a surprising new picture of the moon,” said Greg Delory, a space scientist at UC Berkeley. Read the full story
Vint Cerf, Google’s internet evangelist, has unveiled a new protocol intended to power an interplanetary internet.
The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites.
Cerf and his team were eventually forced to acknowledge (ACK?) that TCP simply couldn’t cut the mustard, with massive delay and data loss caused by celestial motion rendering TCP useless. Read the full story
If you found your grandmother’s diary, tattered and dust covered, up in the attic, would you read it? Of course you would. Granny was a pistol! Brush off the dust, open up the little book, and foray into her lively and interesting past.
Dust cloaks some fascinating tales in other places, too. NASA scientists will soon brush the dust off some Martian rocks that are practically bursting their seams to give their lively account of the red planet’s past. The Mars Science Lab — aptly named “Curiosity” — is heading up there in 2011 to read the diary of Mars.
The small, car-sized rover will ramble about on the rocky surface, gizmos at full tilt, not only brushing dust off rocks but also vaporizing them with a laser beam, gathering samples to analyze on the spot, taking high resolution photographs, and more.
“Curiosity will be prospecting for organic molecules, the chemical building blocks of life,” says Joy Crisp of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We want to find out whether Mars’ environment was, or still is, capable of harboring life.”
“To answer the question ‘Is there life on Mars?’ the most reasonable and productive approach is to look for organic compounds, which could be from life past or present, or from meteorites,” explains Michael Meyer of NASA headquarters. “If you find anything, you know you’re in a region that could preserve evidence of life, if there was any. We have maps from our orbiters, but we don’t know which of the promising looking regions actually contains anything, much less the mother lode.”
“The rock record is of particular interest,” says Crisp. “It has a record from billions of years ago and can answer questions like ‘Where and for how long might Mars have been habitable?’ ‘Was it cold or warm there in the past?’ ‘Was the water there acidic or salty?’”
Curiosity will be the first red planet rover since Spirit and Opportunity. Though it would be hard to match the twins’ toughness, Curiosity will have a much greater range, more instruments, and a bigger, stronger robotic arm. It will be nuclear powered instead of solar, so there will be no worries about dust on solar panels causing energy supplies to plummet. It will have much more power, more consistently.
“Curiosity will even land in a new fashion,” says Crisp. “Spirit and Opportunity were sitting on top of a lander that hit on the surface and bounced, protected by airbags, before coming to rest and opening up. They then had to drive off the top of the lander. A descent stage called Sky Crane will gently lower Curiosity (no airbags needed) via cables, which will be cut once the rover’s wheels set down.
Right: An artist’s concept of Curiosity’s descent to Mars. [larger image] [more]
Meyer adds, “The most important difference is that Spirit and Opportunity aren’t analytical labs – they are more for observing. This newest rover will be performing a more comprehensive study of the Martian environment.”
Remote sensing instruments located on Curiosity’s mast will scout around for promising targets and perform some long-distance analysis before the vehicle moves in for a closer look.
“Curiosity will have a laser on its mast that can take aim at a rock and vaporize a small spot on it,” says Crisp. “This produces a plasma cloud that tells us about that rock’s chemistry. We’ll look at the light reflected off the cloud to characterize rocks and soils from up to 9 meters away. We’ll be able to classify minerals, ices, and organic molecules without having to drive as much.”
The mast also sports a high-resolution camera called, naturally, Mastcam. It will observe, photograph, and videotape geological structures and features, like craters, gullies, and dunes.
The rover’s robotic arm wields its own unique instruments. APXS, the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, will measure the abundance of chemical elements in the dust, soils, rocks, and processed samples. MAHLI, the Mars Hand Lens Imager, will return color images like those of typical digital cameras and act like a geologist’s magnifying lens. Its images can be used to examine the structure and texture of rocks, dust, and frost at the micrometer to centimeter scale.
One laboratory instrument inside the rover’s body will explore the red planet by “sniffing” the air, bird-dog style. SAM, short for Sample Analysis at Mars, has vents that open to the atmosphere to determine where to take samples, for example if it detects methane in the area.
“That’s important because methane can be released by microbes,” explains Crisp, “or by liquid water reacting with rock at depths under the surface. Water ‘down under’ could be a niche for subterranean life. SAM can also be used to sniff the gases released after baking a rock or soil sample in its oven.”
In addition, Curiosity will carry instruments for observing Martian weather and measuring cosmic radiation bombarding the planet’s surface.
“This rover is intrinsically spectacular in terms of what the mission will do,” says Meyer. “It’s a keystone for the future. It sets the stage for understanding whether organics are preserved on Mars and will tell us what we need to use to find out.”
A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.
The moon seems to possess long, winding tunnels called lava tubes that are similar to structures seen on Earth. They are created when the top of a stream of molten rock solidifies and the lava inside drains away, leaving a hollow tube of rock.
Their existence on the moon is hinted at based on observations of sinuous rilles – long, winding depressions carved into the lunar surface by the flow of lava. Some sections of the rilles have collapsed, suggesting that hollow lava tubes hide beneath at least some of the rilles.
But until now, no one has found an opening into what appears to be an intact tube. “There’s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem,” says Carolyn van der Bogert of the University of Münster in Germany. “If it’s intact, you can’t see it.”
Finding a hole in a rille could suggest that an intact tube lies beneath. So a group led by Junichi Haruyama of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency searched for these “skylights” in images taken by Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft, which orbited the moon for almost two years before ending its mission in June.
Deep cave
The team found the first candidate skylight in a volcanic area on the moon’s near side called Marius Hills. “This is the first time that anybody’s actually identified a skylight in a possible lava tube” on the moon, van der Bogert, who helped analyse the feature, told New Scientist.
The hole measures 65 metres across, and based on images taken at a variety of sun angles, the the hole is thought to extend down at least 80 metres. It sits in the middle of a rille, suggesting the hole leads into a lava tube as wide as 370 metres across.
It is not clear exactly how the hole formed. A meteorite impact, moonquakes, or pressure created by gravitational tugs from the Earth could be to blame. Alternatively, part of the lava tube’s ceiling could have been pulled off as lava in the tube drained away billions of years ago.
Since the tubes may be hundreds of metres wide, they could provide plenty of space for an underground lunar outpost. The tubes’ ceilings could protect astronauts from space radiation, meteoroid impacts and wild temperature fluctuations (see Can high-tech cavemen live on the moon?).
“I think it’s really exciting,” says Penny Boston of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro. “Basalt is an extremely good material for radiation protection. It’s free real estate ready to be exploited and modified for human use.”
Blocked passage?
But even if astronauts were to rappel into the hole, they might not be able to travel far into the tube it appears to lead into. “I would bet a lot of money that there’s a tube there, but I would not bet nearly so much that we could gain access to the tube,” says Ray Hawke of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who has also hunted for lunar lava tubes.
Rubble or solidified lava might block up the tube. “It could be closed up and inaccessible,” Hawke told New Scientist.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which should be able to snap images of the area that are at least 10 times as sharp, could help reveal more about the hole. And more lava tube openings may be found.
The Kaguya team is still combing over images of other areas in search of additional skylights. And Hawke says a proposal is in the works to use LRO’s main camera to snap oblique shots of the lunar surface. This could help reveal cave entrances that are not visible in a bird’s-eye view.
A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.
The moon seems to possess long, winding tunnels called lava tubes that are similar to structures seen on Earth. They are created when the top of a stream of molten rock solidifies and the lava inside drains away, leaving a hollow tube of rock. Read the full story
Meteor shower tonight? Yep, peak viewing times for the Orionid meteor shower begins tonight (er… tomorrow) at 1 am.
Are you ready for some meteors? Tuesday night party! Well, that’s how the song might go if Hank Williams Jr. was singing the pre-game to tonight’s Orionid meteor shower.
But as far as we can tell, Williams isn’t adding this to his Monday Night Football schedule and we couldn’t find the pre-game party anyway.
But that doesn’t mean the show’s not going to go on. Anything but. Tonight and tomorrow morning are the peak viewing times of the Orionid meteor shower. Read the full story
Checking in with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, our current emissary to Saturn, some 1.5 billion kilometers (932 million miles) distant from Earth, we find it recently gathering images of the Saturnian system at equinox. During the equinox, the sunlight casts long shadows across Saturn’s rings, highlighting previously known phenomena and revealing a few never-before seen images. Cassini continues to orbit Saturn, part of its extended Equinox Mission, funded through through September 2010. A proposal for a further extension is under consideration, one that would keep Cassini in orbit until 2017, ending with a spectacular series of orbits inside the rings followed by a suicide plunge into Saturn on Sept. 15, 2017. Read the full story
Updated: Thursday, 08 Oct 2009, 1:24 PM EDT
Published : Thursday, 08 Oct 2009, 12:44 PM EDT
From MyFox National Reports
(MYFOX NATIONAL) – NASA hopes to find water on the moon by launching a rocket directly at it. Scientists believe the blast will break up trapped lunar ice allowing them to detect water molecules.
The space agency said it will slam two spacecraft into the moon at 7:30 a.m. EDT Friday in an effort to find water on the moon. NASA is planning a live broadcast of the LCROSS impacts starting at 6:15 a.m. EDT on Oct. 9 on NASA TV. It will stream the event live at www.nasa.gov/ntv . Read the full story
(PhysOrg.com) — Last Wednesday, the Ad Astra Rocket Company tested what is currently the most powerful plasma rocket in the world. As the Webster, Texas, company announced, the VASIMR VX-200 engine ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. The test also marks the first time that a small-scale prototype of the company’s VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) rocket engine has been demonstrated at full power.
“It’s the most powerful plasma rocket in the world right now,” says Franklin Chang-Diaz, former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra. The company has signed an agreement with NASA to test a 200-kilowatt VASIMR engine on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2013. The engine could provide periodic boosts to the ISS, which gradually drops in altitude due to atmospheric drag. ISS boosts are currently provided by spacecraft with conventional thrusters, which consume about 7.5 tonnes of propellant per year. By cutting this amount down to 0.3 tonnes, Chang-Diaz estimates that VASIMR could save NASA millions of dollars per year.
But Ad Astra has bigger plans for VASIMR, such as high-speed missions to Mars. A 10- to 20-megawatt VASIMR engine could propel human missions to Mars in just 39 days, whereas conventional rockets would take six months or more. The shorter the trip, the less time astronauts would be exposed to space radiation, which is a significant hurdle for Mars missions. VASIMR could also be adapted to handle the high payloads of robotic missions, though at slower speeds than lighter human missions.
Chang-Diaz has been working on the development of the VASIMR concept since 1979, before founding Ad Astra in 2005 to further develop the project. The technology uses radio waves to heat gases such as hydrogen, argon, and neon, creating hot plasma. Magnetic fields force the charged plasma out the back of the engine, producing thrust in the opposite direction. Due to the high velocity that this method achieves, less fuel is required than in conventional engines. In addition, VASIMR has no physical electrodes in contact with the plasma, prolonging the engine’s lifetime and enabling a higher power density than in other designs.
Get ready for a unique cosmic collision! Early Friday morning, NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite will end its mission with a bang — literally.
The probe — also known by its acronym, LCROSS — is currently carrying along the upper stage of the rocket that launched it on its way to the moon on June 18. NASA’s game plan is to send that spent rocket motor on a course to smash into the lunar surface. Not just anywhere on the lunar surface, but to a thoroughly scrutinized crater called Cabeus that lies near the moon’s south pole and is enveloped in perpetual darkness. The hoped-for result will be to find hidden water frozen inside the crater.
For seasoned skywatchers here on Earth, the event should also produce a visible cloud of ejected material. However, only knowledgeable amateur astronomers with the right equipment will be able to detect the event. Others can watch the event live on NASA TV.
Smackdown!
The general belief among astronomers is that over the last few billion years, the moon has been bombarded by countless numbers of comets. The water from most of these comets completely sublimated away, but if any settled at the bottom of a crater near the moon’s poles, those permanently shadowed regions can keep the water from disappearing and lock it up as ice for a very long time.
Cabeus is a relatively flat crater about 60 miles (100 kilometers) in diameter on the moon’s south pole. Scientists believe the crater may be one of those special cases that holds water ice in its perpetually shadowed top soil. NASA initially selected a different target for LCROSS, the nearby crater of Cabeus A, but switched to the larger Cabeus because data suggested it had a higher likelihood of containing hidden water ice.
The impact is scheduled to occur this Friday, Oct. 9, at 7:30 a.m. ET. That’s 4:30 a.m. PT, or 11:30 UT. To convert Universal Time to your local time, go here.
Impact will occur less than 10 hours after the spent Centaur rocket motor is released and the LCROSS “shepherding spacecraft” maneuvers into position to trail the Centaur en route to the lunar surface. The 5,000-pound (2,270-kilogram) Centaur is expected to slam into Cabeus at a sharp angle at a speed of 5,600 mph (9,000 kilometers per hour).
If all goes according to schedule, the shepherding vehicle, carrying nine science payloads, will follow the Centaur’s plunge into the moon, beaming back data live to Earth. Like a bullet hitting sand, the Centaur stage’s explosive collision is expected to create a crater roughly 60 or 70 feet wide (20 meters wide) and perhaps as much as 16 feet (5 meters) deep, in the process dredging up approximately 385 tons of lunar dust and soil — enough to fill nearly 18 school buses. In addition to recording the collision, the shepherding spacecraft will fly through the regolith plume thrown up by the collision, just before it too slams into the lunar surface some four minutes later, kicking up its own smaller plume of debris.
In the minutes leading up to its sacrifice to the cause of science, the 1,500-pound (700-kilogram) shepherding spacecraft will use its specialized sensors to look for water’s telltale chemical signature within the larger debris plume created by the Centaur, possibly in the form of ice, hydrocarbons or hydrated materials.
How to watch
NASA wants amateur astronomers to join in a “citizen scientist” program. Jennifer Heldmann heads the LCROSS observing campaign. “We would like to have as many eyes and instruments watching the impact as possible, because this is the way we’ll get the most data and the most information as possible,” she said.
Those who live to the west of Mississippi River will have the best opportunity, because the sky will still be dark. Those living east of the Mississippi will still be able to see the moon, but they’ll also have to contend with morning twilight or, in the case of those living along the Atlantic Seaboard, daylight after sunrise. That makes for a much brighter sky background.
To see LCROSS’ effect, a dark backdrop will be an important prerequisite, since it’s estimated that the debris plume will be no brighter than a sixth-magnitude star (the threshold of naked-eye visibility), and quite likely even fainter.
If you want to try seeing the impact yourself, you need to be aware of some important points.
The bigger, the better
First, you’re going to need a moderately large telescope, somewhere on the order of at least 10 to 12 inches (250mm to 300mm) of aperture. Smaller telescopes will probably not be able to do the job, and you will definitely not see anything using binoculars. You’ll likely need to use magnifications in the 250- to 500-power range to have a legitimate chance of getting a glimpse of the dim impact plume.
Keep in mind that high power dilutes the brightness of an image, and aggravates any unsteadiness of detail. As a general rule of thumb, the maximum amount of magnification for any telescope should be 50-power per inch of aperture.
“But wait a minute,” you may protest, “my telescope comes with a special Barlow lens that the manufacturer promises will double or even triple the magnification of my eyepiece.”
True enough. In fact, that aforementioned 500-power is likely achieved by pushing the scope’s highest power eyepiece with that very same Barlow lens, which ultimately will result in a dim, impossibly fuzzy image.
If you’re a beginner, you need to understand that that using a Barlow lens is similar to enlarging a photograph. The negative, like a telescope’s image, contains only so much detail, which can be blown up only so far before all you can see is fuzz! So if you have a 3-inch (75mm) department store telescope — even if it is blessed with perfect optics — the claim of 500-power is more than three times the limit of the most practical magnification that it can provide.
The impact will take place at the lunar south pole, or on the lower limb of the moon along the dark portion immediately adjacent to the terminator (the line that separates the illuminated day side and the dark night side of the Moon). Try to keep the very bright sunlit portion of the moon out of the field of view as much as possible.
The plume is expected to be in the shape of a “Vm” but it will be exceedingly small in size relative to the moon itself. According to NASA’s Brian H. Day, the dusty material is only expected to rise about 6 miles (10 kilometers) above the lunar surface. From Earth, that would be equal to about one-quarter of 1 percent of the moon’s apparent size or about 5.2 arc seconds.
To get an idea of just how large this is, point your telescope toward Jupiter, which conveniently shines in the southern part of our current evening sky. Jupiter’s disk currently measures 45 arc seconds in diameter; so the dust plume from LCROSS would appear only about one-ninth as large as that!
And the plume — if and when it’s visible — will not last very long. The best guesstimates are that it will last no more than two minutes.
You can get more detailed viewing tips from NASA here.
Observatories expected to participate in the study include the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope, Hawaii’s Keck and Gemini telescopes, the Magdelena Ridge and Apache Ridge observatories in New Mexico, the MMT Observatory in Arizona and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) now circling the moon.
Lastly, you can watch the event live on NASA TV, beginning at 6:30 a.m. ET (3:30 a.m. PT).
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