The annual Leonid Meteor Shower will peak in the early hours Tuesday, November 17.

The best place to watch it is in Asia, but North American observers should have an above average viewing, weather permitting. To see the best chance, head outside between 1 a.m. and dawn. NASA is predicting 20-30 metors per hour can be seen in America. The Leonids puts on a great show every year and this year the moon is near its new phase so it should not interfere in viewing.

What is the Leonid Meteor Shower?

The Leonids are created by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which passes through the inner solar system every 33 years on its orbit around the sun. Each time by, it leaves a new river of debris, mostly bits of ice and rock no bigger than a sand grain but a few the size of a pea or marble. Over time, these cosmic streams spread out, so predicting exactly what will happen is difficult, but Earth usually plows into the debris, the pieces hit the atmosphere and vaporize, creating sometimes dramatic streaks of light and the occasional fireball with a smoky-looking trail that can remain visible for several minutes.

It’s official: There’s water ice on the moon, and lots of it. When melted, the water could potentially be used to drink or to extract hydrogen for rocket fuel.

NASA’s LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced today. The findings confirm suspicions announced previously, and in a big way.

“Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit, we found a significant amount,” Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from 

The LCROSS probe impacted the lunar south pole at a crater called Cabeus on Oct. 9. The $79 million spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket stage, hit the lunar surface in an effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs of water ice.

Those signs were visible in the data from spectrographic measurements (which measure light absorbed at different wavelengths, revealing different compounds) of the Centaur stage crater and the two-part debris plume the impact created. The signature of water was seen in both infrared and ultraviolet spectroscopic measurements.

“We see evidence for the water in two instruments,” Colaprete said. “And that’s what makes us really confident in our findings right now.”

How much?

Based on the measurements, the team estimated about 100 kilograms of water in the view of their instruments — the equivalent of about a dozen 2-gallon buckets — in the area of the impact crater (about 80 feet, or 20 meters across) and the ejecta blanket (about 60 to 80 meters across), Colaprete said.

“I’m pretty impressed by the amount of water we saw in our little 20-meter crater,” Colaprete said.

“What’s really exciting is we’ve only hit one spot. It’s kind of like when you’re drilling for oil. Once you find it one place, there’s a greater chance you’ll find more nearby,” said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.

This water finding doesn’t mean that the moon is wet by Earth’s standards, but is likely wetter than some of the driest deserts on Earth, Colaprete said. And even this small amount is valuable to possible future missions, said Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA Headquarters.

Scientists have suspected that permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon could be cold enough to keep water frozen at the surface based on detections of hydrogen by previous moon missions. Water has already been detected on the moon by a NASA-built instrument on board India’s now defunct Chandrayaan-1 probe and other spacecraft, though it was in very small amounts and bound to the dirt and dust of the lunar surface.

Water wasn’t the only compound seen in the debris plumes of the LCROSS impact.

“There’s a lot of stuff in there,” Colaprete said. What exactly those other compounds are hasn’t yet been determined, but could include organic materials that would hint at comet impacts in the past.

More questions

The findings show that “the lunar poles are sort of record keepers” of lunar history and solar system history because these permanently-shadowed regions are very cold “and that means that they tend to trap and keep things that encounter them,” said Greg Delory, a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. “So they have a story to tell about the history of the moon and the solar system climate.”

“This is ice that’s potentially been there for billions of years,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator at Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The confirmation that water exists on the moon isn’t the end of the story though. One key question to answer is where the water came from. Several theories have been put forward to explain the origin of the water, including debris from comet impacts, interaction of the lunar surface with the solar wind, and even giant molecular clouds passing through the solar system, Delory said.

Scientists also want to examine the data further to figure out what state the water is in. Colaprete said that based on initial observations, it is likely water ice is interspersed between dirt particles on the lunar surface.

Some other questions scientists want to answer are what kinds of processes move, destroy and create the water on the surface and how long the water has been there, Delory said.

Link to Chandrayaan?

Scientists also are looking to see if there is any link between the water observed by LCROSS and that discovered by Chandrayaan-1.

“Their observation is entirely unique and complementary to what we did,” Colaprete said. Scientists still need to work out whether the water observed by Chandrayaan-1 might be slowly migrating to the poles, or if it is unrelated.

Bottom line, the discovery completely changes scientists’ view of the moon, Wargo said.

The discovery gives “a much bigger, potentially complicated picture for water on the moon” than what was thought even just a few months ago, he said. “This is not your father’s moon; this is not a dead planetary body.”

Let’s go?

NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 for extended missions on the lunar surface. Finding usable amounts of ice on the moon would be a boon for that effort since it could be a vital local resource to support a lunar base.

“Water really is one of the constituents of one of the most powerful rocket fuels, oxygen and hydrogen,” Wargo said.

The water LCROSS detected “would be water you could drink, water like any other water,” Colaprete said. “If you could clean it, it would be drinkable water.”

The impact was observed by LCROSS’s sister spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other space and ground-based telescopes.

The debris plume from the impacts was not seen right away and was only revealed a week after the impact, when mission scientists had had time to comb through the probe’s data.

NASA launched LCROSS — short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — and LRO in June.

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LOS ANGELES — NASA says the chances of an 885-foot (270-meter) asteroid striking Earth in 2036 have been downgraded.

Scientists initially believed there was a 1-in-45,000 chance that Apophis could hit the planet on April 13, 2036. But NASA said Wednesday the threat has been dropped to 1-in-250,000 after it recalculated the asteriod’s path.

Earth got a scare in 2004, when initial readings suggested the newly discovered Apophis seemed to have a chance of hitting in 2029. Further observations ruled out any possibility of an impact.

Apophis is scheduled to make a close but harmless approach in 2029.

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Water water EVERYWHERE !

It’s now official that water has been found on the moon, and scientists have long seen it on Mars as well. In fact, water is all over the solar system and the rest of the galaxy – and since water is key to life as we know it, these discoveries raise the hope that we are not in fact alone.

The inner planets

Although the moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, new observations from three different spacecraft have uncovered what has been called “unambiguous evidence” of water across the surface of the moon.

On Mars, giant cracks were recently found etched across crater basins that hinted at ancient lakes, and liquid water is thought to have been common across a vast region of ancient Mars billions of years ago. Craters recently even revealed that more water ice is buried closer to the red planet’s equator than would be expected, “which implies there was more water in the atmosphere of Mars in the not too distant past,” explained Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

But liquid and frozen water are not limited to Earth’s closest neighbors in space.

Even hellish Venus may once have been lush with oceans. Although space probes in the 1960s found the surface of Venus was now hot enough to melt lead, images collected from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft suggest hints of past oceans. A runaway greenhouse effect – a far magnified version of the global warming seen occurring on Earth – apparently led its seas to evaporate away. “Its water, by absorbing heat, might have actually helped contribute to its greenhouse warming,” Meyer said.

The outer worlds and beyond

Most moons of the solar system’s gas giants are also rich in water.

• On Saturn’s moon Titan, “cryovolcanoes” are thought to erupt with cold slurries of water ice and ammonia.
• Another Saturnian moon, Enceladus, is thought to have an ocean beneath its icy shell that likely feeds jets of water ice seen spurting from that moon.
• Jupiter’s moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, Neptune’s Triton and the Uranian moons Titania and Oberon are also thought to potentially harbor hidden seas.

The outer worlds themselves are rather icy. Neptune and Uranus are often dubbed “ice giants” because they are rich with water, ammonia, and methane. Pluto is thought to consist roughly of 30 percent water ice. Beyond them lie the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud and the scattered disk, home to untold numbers of comets and icy dwarf planets such as Eris.

In fact, water is often found as ice or gas around stars and in the clouds between them. Signs of water have even been seen on planets outside our solar system.

What does it mean?

The fact that water is so water is abundant should not be such a surprise. “Water is ridiculously common, one of the most common molecules in the universe,” said Nicolas Cowan, an astronomer and astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

What seems rare is finding water in liquid form. In space, it either vaporizes if it is too hot or freezes if it is too cold .

“The only time you ever find it stable as a liquid is when you get enough atmosphere down to provide enough pressure to keep it liquid,” Cowan explained.

Scientists looking for aliens consider liquid water “the Holy Grail, the thing that people really want to find,” Cowan said. “Water is the main requirement we can see that life on Earth seems to have.” Although life also needs a source of energy of some kind, in many ways, “you don’t have to worry too much about that,” Meyer added, since Earth shows that life can live off many different kinds of energy, from the sun or heat or chemicals.

Other life forms

Of course, alien life might not require water at all. Although it makes sense for life to require carbon, “since carbon chemistry is amazingly complex, affording one the opportunity to become complex enough to start life,” Meyer explained, “you could have a liquid medium for carbon-based chemistry besides water – ammonia, for instance.”

The most exciting aspect of the water that researchers are uncovering in the solar system might be how it can support humanity, not aliens.

“If we find water in sufficient quantities that it makes sense for us to use it, we can go to there and make rocket fuel out of it by separating hydrogen from oxygen, make use of resources in situ rather than shipping everything from Earth,” Meyer said.

Still, don’t rule out extraterrestrial life in the solar system. All the water discovered on Mars is challenging what scientists know of the red planet – enough perhaps to “dream up scenarios where the surface of Mars was a more habitable place in the distant past, with critters retreating to the subsurface to still live,” Cowan noted.

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Indian probe discovers water on the moon!

Dreams of establishing a manned Moon base could become reality within two decades after India’s first lunar mission found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface.

Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough — to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today — would change the face of lunar exploration.

The discovery is a significant boost for India in its space race against China. Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission’s project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, said: “It’s very satisfying.”

The search for water was one of the mission’s main objectives, but it was a surprise nonetheless, scientists said.The unmanned craft was equipped with Nasa’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, designed specifically to search for water by picking up the electromagnetic radiation emitted by minerals. The M3 also made the unexpected discovery that water may still be forming on the surface of the Moon, according to scientists familiar with the mission.

“It’s very satisfying,” said Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the project director of Chandrayaan-1 at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bangalore. “This was one of the main objectives of Chandrayaan-1, to find evidence of water on the Moon,” he told The Times.

Dr Annadurai would not provide any further details before a news conference at Nasa today from Dr Carle Pieters, a planetary geologist of Brown University who oversaw the M3.

Dr Pieters has not spoken about her results so far and was not available for comment last night, according to colleagues at Brown University. But her results are expected to cause a sensation, and to set the agenda for lunar exploration in the next decade.

They will also provide a significant boost for India as it tries to catch up with China in what many see as a 21st-century space race. “This will create a considerable stir. It was wholly unexpected,” said one scientist also involved in Chandrayaan-1. “People thought that Chandrayaan was just lagging behind the rest but the science that’s coming out, it’s going to be agenda-setting.”

Scientists have long hoped that astronauts could be based on the Moon and use water found there to drink, extract oxygen to breathe and use hydrogen as fuel.

Several studies havesuggested that there could be ice in the craters around the Moon’s poles, but scientists have been unable to confirm the suspicions.

The M3, an imaging spectrometer, was designed to search for water by detecting the electromagnetic radiation given off by different minerals on and just below the surface of the Moon. Unlike previous lunar spectrometers, it was sensitive enough to detect the presence of small amounts of water.

M3 was one of two Nasa instruments among 11 pieces of equipment from around the world on Chandrayaan-1, which was launched into orbit around the Moon in October last year. ISRO lost control of Chandrayaan-1 last month, and aborted the mission ahead of schedule, but not before M3 and the other instruments had beamed data back to Earth.

Another lunar scientist familiar with the findings said: “This is the most exciting breakthrough in at least a decade. And it will probably change the face of lunar exploration for the next decade.”

Scientists are eagerly awaiting the results of two American unmanned lunar missions, which were both launched in June, that could also prove the existence of water on the Moon.

Early results from Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recorded temperatures as low as -238C (minus 396.4F) in polar craters on the Moon, according to the journal Nature. That makes them the coldest recorded spots in the solar system, even colder than the surface of Pluto, and could mean that ice has been trapped for billions of years, the journal said. The LRO has also detected an abundance of hydrogen, thought to be a key indicator of ice, at the poles.

The other Nasa mission, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), is due to crash a probe into a polar crater on October 9 in the hope of sending up a plume of ice that can be examined by telescope.

“We are on the verge of a renaissance in our thinking about the poles of the Moon, including how water ice gets there,” Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS, said in Nature.

Big bang

• The Moon is 4.6 billion years old, about the same age as the Earth

• It is thought to have formed from a giant dust cloud caused when a rogue planet collided with the Earth

• It is 238,000 miles from the Earth

• Gravity on the Moon is a sixth of that on Earth

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Jupiter Impact Site (Hubble/NASA)

The unexpected impact of some space object with Jupiter, creating a dark bruise in the gas giant’s atmosphere, proved a tempting enough target for scientists to put a hold on testing out the revamped Hubble Space Telescope and use its new camera to capture an image of the rare event.

The plan, first reported by Spaceflight Now, was carried out yesterday so that astronomers could use the 19-year-old Hubble’s unique capabilities to get an image of the spot, probably caused by a comet, before too many days had passed since the impact and Jupiter’s atmosphere distorted the shape.

The new Hubble image, released today, shows a lumpiness to the debris plume caused by turbulence in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The image is a natural color image of Jupiter in visible light.

“It was important for Hubble to get an early look,” said Hubble spokesman Ray Villard.

The dark spot was first noticed by chance by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley in Australia on Sunday, July 19.

The bruise is near Jupiter’s southern pole and is about the size of the Pacific Ocean, according to one astronomer’s estimates.

The feature is reminiscent of the 1994 impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

A past encounter between Jupiter and 22 pieces of comet Shoemaker-Levy-9

While astronomers don’t know for sure what impacted Jupiter this time around, “the best guess is that it’s a comet,” the reasoning being that comets cross Jupiter’s orbit while asteroids rarely do, Villard said.

While other telescopes (including the Keck II telescope and the Gemini Observatory, both in Hawaii) have trained their eyes on the spot in recent days, it was important for Hubble to take a look because “it’s the sharpest at visible wavelengths,” Villard told SPACE.com. Hubble also has capabilities to look at ultraviolet wavelengths, which can show details of the impact debris that has been tossed high into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

“It really was incumbent upon us to join with the other telescopes,” Villard said.

Hubble was in the middle of testing and calibration of its new instruments, installed by astronauts during a service mission in May. Hubble managers decided that the impact event was rare enough and important enough to pause testing to get a look.

Recent glitches have delayed the commissioning of some instruments, but the new Wide Field Camera 3 is working fine.

“It’s not fully calibrated, but it doesn’t mean we can’t take pictures,” Villard said.

With the Hubble images complementing other telescope’s efforts, astronomers hope to learn more about the dark spot and the impactor that caused it.

This Hubble picture, taken on 23 July, is the sharpest visible-light picture taken of the atmospheric debris from a comet or asteroid that collided with Jupiter on 19 July. This is Hubble's first science observation following its repair and upgrade in May. The image was taken with the new Wide Field Camera 3.(NASA, ESA, and H. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado and the Jupiter Comet Impact Team)

With the data astronomers have from the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact, they can guess at some features of the likely comet. It is estimated to have been no bigger than half a kilometer and likely had thousands of times the energy of the Tunguska impact here on Earth, which generated a huge explosion over Siberia in 1908, flattening an area as big as a large city.

Hubble is slated to take more images of the new impact spot in the coming days, to help astronomers track its progress. In between pictures, the Hubble team should be able to resume testing and calibration of the camera.

Source

Shalbatana Lake - Mars (G. Di Achille, University of Colorado)

First unambiguous evidence for shorelines on the surface of Mars, say researchers

A University of Colorado at Boulder research team has discovered the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars, an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet.

Estimated to be more than 3 billion years old, the lake appears to have covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep — roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Gaetano Di Achille, who led the study. The shoreline evidence, found along a broad delta, included a series of alternating ridges and troughs thought to be surviving remnants of beach deposits.

“This is the first unambiguous evidence of shorelines on the surface of Mars,” said Di Achille. “The identification of the shorelines and accompanying geological evidence allows us to calculate the size and volume of the lake, which appears to have formed about 3.4 billion years ago.”

A paper on the subject by Di Achille, CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Brian Hynek and CU-Boulder Research Associate Mindi Searls, all of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, has been published online in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

Images used for the study were taken by a high-powered camera known as the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE. Riding on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, HiRISE can resolve features on the surface down to one meter in size from its orbit 200 miles above Mars.

An analysis of the HiRISE images indicate that water carved a 30-mile-long canyon that opened up into a valley, depositing sediment that formed a large delta. This delta and others surrounding the basin imply the existence of a large, long-lived lake, said Hynek, also an assistant professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department. The lake bed is located within a much larger valley known as the Shalbatana Vallis.

“Finding shorelines is a Holy Grail of sorts to us,” said Hynek.

In addition, the evidence shows the lake existed during a time when Mars is generally believed to have been cold and dry, which is at odds with current theories proposed by many planetary scientists, he said. “Not only does this research prove there was a long-lived lake system on Mars, but we can see that the lake formed after the warm, wet period is thought to have dissipated.”

Planetary scientists think the oldest surfaces on Mars formed during the wet and warm Noachan epoch from about 4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago that featured a bombardment of large meteors and extensive flooding. The newly discovered lake is believed to have formed during the Hesperian epoch and postdates the end of the warm and wet period on Mars by 300 million years, according to the study.

The deltas adjacent to the lake are of high interest to planetary scientists because deltas on Earth rapidly bury organic carbon and other biomarkers of life, according to Hynek. Most astrobiologists believe any present indications of life on Mars will be discovered in the form of subterranean microorganisms.

But in the past, lakes on Mars would have provided cozy surface habitats rich in nutrients for such microbes, Hynek said.

The retreat of the lake apparently was rapid enough to prevent the formation of additional, lower shorelines, said Di Achille. The lake probably either evaporated or froze over with the ice slowly turning to water vapor and disappearing during a period of abrupt climate change, according to the study.

Di Achille said the newly discovered pristine lake bed and delta deposits would be would be a prime target for a future landing mission to Mars in search of evidence of past life.

“On Earth, deltas and lakes are excellent collectors and preservers of signs of past life,” said Di Achille. “If life ever arose on Mars, deltas may be the key to unlocking Mars’ biological past.”

Source

From an Avid Reader

Example from LOIRP

It’s from the The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) where they have (or are in the process of) restoring / rebuilding a couple Ampex FR-900 units of 60’s vintage to be able to read the high-resolution image tapes taken in ‘66 that have been in storage and not tossed by the perserverence of NASA employees. They are of much greater quality than what was released at the time. The drives are being pieced together/rebuilt from a few remaining units, and the storage format is being reverse engineered. Some sample images are out but I hear they have to do a lot more work to make the (working) drive operable for longer time periods…

http://www.moonviews.com/archives/loirp/

]]> http://spacejibe.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/switch-on-success-for-superscope/ Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:23:09 +0000 bferrari http://spacejibe.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/switch-on-success-for-superscope/

The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank dominates the Cheshire landscape

The first stage of the switch-on of one of the world’s most powerful stargazing systems has got under way.

Seven radio telescopes around the UK have been linked with optical fibres, allowing scientists to probe deeper into the Universe than ever before.

The new data-link upgrade has replaced the older microwave technology that once connected the telescopes.

Tim O’Brien, from the e-Merlin project, said: “It will be a revolution in terms of what we can do with our astronomy.”

Astronomers at Jodrell Bank say that the e-Merlin array will be fully operational later this year.

Story continues here

Monday, April 13, 2009

Artist's conception of the hypothetical impact of Theia and young Earth. (NASA/GSFC)

The solar system might once have had another planet named Theia, which may have helped create our own planet’s moon.

Now two spacecrafts are heading out to search for leftovers from this rumored sibling, which would have been destroyed when the solar system was still young.

“It’s a hypothetical world. We’ve never actually seen it, but some researchers believe it existed 4.5 billion years ago — and that it collided with Earth to form the moon,” said Mike Kaiser, a NASA scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Theia is thought to have been about Mars-sized. If the planet crashed into Earth long ago, debris from the collision could have clumped together to form the moon. This scenario, called the “giant impact hypothesis,” was first conceived by Princeton scientists Edward Belbruno and Richard Gott.

Many scientists figure that indeed some large object crashed into Earth, and the resulting debris coalesced to form the moon. It is unclear though if that colliding object was a planet, asteroid or comet.

In any case, the debris that would have spun out from the two slamming bodies would have mixed together, and could explain some aspects of the moon’s geology, such as the size of the moon’s core and the density and composition of moon rocks.

Scientists are hoping NASA’s twin STEREO probes, launched in 2006, will be able to discover leftover traces of Theia that may finally help close the case on the birth of our moon.

So far, signs of Theia have proved elusive to telescopes searching from Earth. But the STEREO spacecraft are set to enter special points in space, called Lagrangian points, where the gravity from the Earth and the sun combine to form wells that tend to collect solar system detritus.

“The STEREO probes are entering these regions of space now,” Kaiser, a STEREO project scientist, said. “This puts us in a good position to search for Theia’s asteroid-sized leftovers.”

By visiting the Lagrangian points directly, STEREO will be able to hunt for Theia chunks up close. The nearest approach to the bottoms of the gravitational wells will come in September and October 2009.

“STEREO is a solar observatory,” Kaiser said. “The two probes are flanking the sun on opposite sides to gain a 3-D view of solar activity. We just happen to be passing through the L4 and L5 Lagrange points en route. This is purely bonus science.”

Scientists think Theia may even have formed in one of these gravitational points of balance from the accumulation of flotsam that had built up there.

“Computer models show that Theia could have grown large enough to produce the moon if it formed in the L4 or L5 [Lagrangian] regions, where the balance of forces allowed enough material to accumulate,” Kaiser said. “Later, Theia would have been nudged out of L4 or L5 by the increasing gravity of other developing planets like Venus and sent on a collision course with Earth.”

Source

Gizmodo

A 30-50 meter-wide asteroid just passed seven times closer to us than the moon, glowing so bright you could see it through a cloud. If it had hit the ocean, it would have tsunamied.

The Sydney Morning Herald says that if it had been headed toward a populated part of the world, we would have had 24 hours to act and evacuate. Sky and Telescope says that it was about twice the altitude of our communications satellites.

To put it into perspective, here’s io9’s list of scariest asteroid attacks on Earth, not including this one.

It would have looked somewhat similar to this, the great daylight fireball of 1972. How do we know that wasn’t Kal-El? [SMH and Nasa - Image credit to the original artist]

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A still of the Kaguya/Selene probe's high-definition video of the solar eclipse seen from the moon. (JAXA)

Monday, March 02, 2009

There was a solar eclipse earlier this month — but it wasn’t visible anywhere on Earth.

Rather, a Japanese space probe in orbit around the moon got spectacular high-definition video of the sun being blocked — by the Earth, producing an otherworldly “diamond-ring” eclipse.

It may be only the third time such an eclipse has been viewed by terrestrials, human or otherwise.

An American lunar lander got a blurry snapshot of a solar eclipse in 1967, and two years later Apollo 12 astronauts got treated to the same thing on their way back from the moon.

The Kaguya, or Selene, probe was traveling from the dark to the light side of the moon on Feb. 9.

The sun rose over the moon’s surface, as usual, but on Feb. 9 it was just a thin ring surrounding darkness.

(The Earth’s disk is a bit smaller than the sun’s when viewed from the moon; on Earth, the moon just about covers the sun.)

In the video, only a small semi-circle is visible at first as the sun rises over the horizon.

The sun being eclipsed by the Earth in a photo taken by the Apollo 12 mission in November 1969. (NASA)

The circle quickly expands, but before it’s complete the sun suddenly breaks forth from the lower right corner of the circle, filling the screen with light.

• Click here to watch the video.

• Click here for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) press release.

• Click here for a longer press release from NASA.

Source

(CNN) — As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there’s new buzz that “Star Trek’s” vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched.

An artist's impression shows a planet passing in front of its parent star. Such events are called transits.

Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space.

There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets.”

He made the prediction based on the number of “super-Earths” — planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter — discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.

Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.

“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said.

“But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”

Putting a number on alien worlds

Other scientists are taking another approach: an analysis that suggests there could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.

In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.

Duncan Forgan, a doctoral candidate at the university who led the study, said he was surprised by the hardiness of life on these other worlds.

“The computer model takes into account what we refer to as resetting or extinction events. The classic example is the asteroid impact that may have wiped out the dinosaurs,” Forgan said.

“I half-expected these events to disallow the rise of intelligence, and yet civilizations seemed to flourish.”

Forgan readily admits the results are an educated guess at best, since there are still many unanswered questions about how life formed on Earth and only limited information about the 330 “exoplanets” — those circling sun-like stars outside the solar system — discovered so far.

The first was confirmed in 1995 and the latest just this month when Europe’s COROT space telescope spotted the smallest terrestrial exoplanet ever found. With a diameter less than twice the size of Earth, the planet orbits very close to its star and has temperatures up to 1,500° Celsius (more than 2,700° Fahrenheit), according to the European Space Agency. It may be rocky and covered in lava.

Johannes Kepler - brilliant student of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe

Hunt for habitable planets

NASA is hoping to find much more habitable worlds with the help of the upcoming Kepler mission. The spacecraft, set to be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida next week, will search for Earth-size planets in our part of the galaxy.

Kepler contains a special telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years. It will look for small dips in a star’s brightness, which can mean an orbiting planet is passing in front it — an event called a transit.

“It’s akin to measuring a flea as it creeps across the headlight of an automobile at night,” said Kepler project manager James Fanson during a during a NASA news conference.

The focus of the mission is finding planets in a star’s habitable zone, an orbit that would ensure temperatures in which life could exist. Watch a NASA scientist explain the search for habitable planets »

Boss, who serves on the Kepler Science Council, said scientists should know by 2013 — the end of Kepler’s mission — whether life in the universe could be widespread.

Explore the Kepler Mission: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html

Finding intelligent life is a very different matter. For all the speculation about the possibility of other civilizations in the universe, the question remains: If the rise of life on Earth isn’t unique and aliens are common, why haven’t they shown up or contacted us? The contradiction was famously summed up by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 in what became known as the Fermi paradox: “Where is everybody?”

The answer may be the vastness of time and space, scientists explained.

“Civilizations come and go,” Boss said. “Chances are, if you do happen to find a planet which is going to have intelligent life, it’s not going to be in [the same] phase of us. It may have formed a billion years ago, or maybe it’s not going to form for another billion years.”

Even if intelligent civilizations did exist at the same time, they probably would be be separated by tens of thousands of light years, Forgan said. If aliens have just switched on their transmitter to communicate, it could take us hundreds of centuries to receive their message, he added.

As for interstellar travel, the huge distances virtually rule out any extraterrestrial visitors.

To illustrate, Boss said the fastest rockets available to us right now are those being used in NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. Even going at that rate of speed, it would take 100,000 years to get from Earth to the closest star outside the solar system, he added.

“So when you think about that, maybe we shouldn’t be worried about having interstellar air raids any time soon,” Boss said.

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A close-up image of the Bejar bolide, photographed from Torrelodones, Madrid, Spain. (J. Perez Vallejo/SPMN)

Bright lights that suddenly streak across the night sky with an accompanying boom tend to elicit a flurry of phone calls to local police departments.

These rare events aren’t typically wayward missiles, or satellite debris (as was thought when one such streak recently lit up the skies over Texas), or alien invasions. But they do come from outer space.

Scientists aptly call the objects fireballs because they are the brightest meteors, or “shooting stars,” that fall to Earth.

A fireball as bright as the full moon raced across the Spanish skies on July 11, 2008, and was tracked by the Spanish Fireball Network (SPMN). Researchers used the tracking data to trace the path of the comet backwards through the sky and space; they think the boulder may be a chunk of a comet that broke up nearly 90 years ago. Their conclusions are detailed in the Feb. 11 online issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

It’s possible that chunks of the fireball made it to the ground and are waiting to be picked up, the researchers said, which would give scientists a rare glimpse into the heart of a comet.

Meteors and fireballs

Earth and the other planets of the solar system are under constant bombardment from particles that range in size from a sand grain to a boulder and are collectively known as meteoroids. Many meteoroids are the detritus left over from collisions of asteroids and comets and impacts to other planets.

If a meteoroid enters Earth’s atmosphere, it starts to burn up, forming a bright streak in the sky, called a meteor. Meteors can come from asteroid or comet fragments. If that meteor is brighter than any of the planets in the sky, it is deemed a fireball (also called a bolide).

A blazing bolide can also create a sonic boom that can be heard up to 30 miles away — these explosive noises were heard over Kentucky on Friday, Feb. 13, and over Texas on Sunday, Feb. 15, causing a number of startled citizens to call local law enforcement.

Initial speculation that these streaks of light and accompanying boom were caused by debris from the Feb. 10 collision of two satellites was later refuted by astronomers, who said it was likely a meteor. Preston Starr, the observatory manager at the University of North Texas, told the Associated Press that the object would have been about the size of a truck and that somewhere between eight and 10 such objects burn up in the atmosphere every year.

Spanish sighting

The bolide that shot across the Spanish skies in July was also seen in Portugal and southern France.

At maximum intensity, it was 150 times brighter than the full moon. It was first picked up by the SPMN above Bejar in the western part of Spain at a height of about 61 miles (98 kilometers) and disappeared from view at about 13 miles (21 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth.

A professional photographer also snapped a picture of the streak from the north of Madrid.

From these images, astronomers Josep Trigo-Rodríguez of the Institute of Space Studies, CSIC-IEEC in Spain, Jose Madiedo of the University of Huelva-CIECEM in Spain and Iwan Williams of the University of London were able to deduce the trajectory and properties of the incoming fireball.

Their work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the National Institute of Aerospatial Technique, and the Junta de Andalucía.

The team thinks the bolide was a dense object, about 3 feet (about 1 meter) across with a mass of about 4,000 pounds (1.8 tonnes). This would be like squeezing an adult elephant down to the size of an armchair.

The rock would have been big enough that chunks of it may have survived the fiery passage through the atmosphere and hit the ground as meteorites. Finding these pieces would be a boon to science if they are, as the team suspects, remnants of a comet breakup.

The bolide traveled an unusual orbit around the sun, as determined by the astronomers, following a path that took it from beyond the orbit of Jupiter to the vicinity of Earth. This orbit is similar to that of a cloud of dust particles known as the Omicron Draconids, which on rare occasions produce a minor meteor shower on Earth.

This collection of meteoroids is thought to originate from the breakup of Comet C/1919 Q2 Metcalf in 1920.

It has been proposed that comets consist of large boulders glued together by a mixture of smaller particles and ice. If the nucleus of the comet disintegrates, the boulders are set loose in space. Finding chunks of the Bejar bolide could help confirm this theory.

“Handling pieces of comet would fulfill the long-held ambitions of scientists — it would effectively give us a look inside some of the most enigmatic objects in the solar system,” Trigo-Rodríguez said.

• Video — All About Comets
• Video — Comets: Bright Tails, Black Hearts
• Video — The Comet That Changed Comet-Hunting

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I’m getting drawn-in to this website, for the Astronomical Research Institute, a reportedly one-man outfit help to discover and track asteroids that might be headed for earth.

There are over 1,000 of these “potentially hazardous asteroids,” according to ARI’s Killer Asteroid Project.

It’s a fun site to explore (link at the end of this post). I stumbled across this passage, which blew my mind a bit, and got me thinking about NASA’s true mission: tossing-up sats and weapons around Earth, not to explore space, but to monitor us.

The reason, I believe, that boys and girls are not interested in space (as measured by Sky and Telescope subscriptions), is that nobody else is, either (save for a few aging, amateur astronomers).

Since the late 1970’s interest in astronomy among people under the age of 30 has decreased dramatically. According to the Astronomical League, in 1979, over 34% of all subscribers to Sky and Telescope magazine were individuals under the age of 30. Today less than 4% of subscribers come from this same age group. High school students now comprise less than 0.005% the total subscriptions to this publication!

via Astronomical Research Institute astronomy awards.

By Tariq Malik
Senior Editor
posted: 21 January 2009
8:01 am ET

NASA’s plans for the mammoth Ares V rocket could do more than just launch new lunar landers and cargo to the moon. It could also haul massive telescopes that dwarf the Hubble Space Telescope or fling deep space probes on faster missions to the outer planets.

Slated to make its first test flight in 2018, the Ares V rocket is designed to stand about 381 feet (116 meters) tall and be able to launch payloads weighing almost 180 metric tons into low-Earth orbit.

“When it’s built, it’ll be the biggest rocket that’s ever been built,” said Kathy Laurini, project manager for NASA’s Altair lunar lander designed to ride an Ares V to the moon by 2020, has said. “It’s quite big.”

But while the Ares V is designed under NASA’s Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon, the rocket behemoth presents a boon for astronomers and other scientists dreaming of bigger, better space-based observatories.

“The science community is taking a hard look at Ares V and its capability,” Laurini told SPACE.com. “It helps them enable a whole other class of mission.”

A concept image shows the Ares V cargo launch vehicle. Credit: NASA/MSFC

Heavy rocket science

The two-stage Ares V rocket is designed to launch Altair landers and an Earth departure stage into Earth orbit, where they’ll be met by an Orion crew-carrying spacecraft launched atop a smaller Ares I rocket. Two 5 1/2-segment solid rocket boosters derived from the current four-segment versions that launch NASA space shuttles will help Ares V haul payloads weighing nearly 396,000 pounds (180,000 kg) – or the equivalent of 17 school buses – into space.

“Imagine the kind of telescope a rocket like that could launch,” said Harley Thronson, an astronomer leading advanced concepts in astronomy at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “It could revolutionize astronomy.”

Ares V will stand taller than NASA’s last gargantuan booster – the 363-foot (110-meter) Saturn V moon rocket – and will barely fit inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at the agency’s Florida launch site, NASA officials have said. Its nosecone is large enough to accommodate eight school buses stacked vertically, and its engines generate enough thrust to launch six times the cargo of a NASA space shuttle in a space three times larger than an orbiter’s payload bay, they added.

An artist's concept of the Single Aperture Far-Infrared Telescope (SAFIR) that could be launched aboard the Ares V. Credit: NASA.

Space telescopes of the future

A 2008 National Research Council report found that 12 of 17 potential flagship space science missions could benefit from the repurposing of NASA’s Ares V rocket for space missions beyond hauling cargo and landers to the moon. The missions range from massive space telescopes to planetary probes to the sun, Neptune and Saturn’s moon Titan.

The report, entitled “Launching Science: Science Opportunities Provided by NASA’s Constellation System,” cautioned that while such missions could cost more than $5 billion a piece, NASA’s Ares V rocket offered unique capabilities to launch enormous space telescopes that would humble Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope slated to launch in 2013.

“The bigger the better,” Thronson said. “NASA’s new Ares V rocket is going to completely change the rules of the game.”

The roomy 33-foot (10-meter) payload shroud for Ares V allows extra space for space telescopes with larger main mirrors.

Hubble’s main mirror, for example, is about 7.8 feet (2.4 meters) across. Ares V could fit an observatory nearly three times larger, like the proposed 26-foot (8-meter) Monolithic Space Telescope, which would be able to observe objects in space 11 times more fainter and with three times the sharpness of Hubble, NASA officials said.

“The 8-meter-diameter telescope can only fit inside an Ares V payload fairing,” the NRC report stated.

Think bigger

Even larger space telescopes could be packed atop the rocket if their mirrors were folded up for launch, such the 52-foot (16-meter) Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAST) planned by astronomer Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute. The optical and ultraviolet light observatory could refine the search for habitable planets around distant stars and help better understand galaxy formation around supermassive black holes.

“ATLAST would be nearly 2,000 times more sensitive than the Hubble Telescope and would provide images about seven times sharper than either Hubble or James Webb,” Postman said. “It could help us find the long sought answer to a very compelling question, ‘Is there life elsewhere in the galaxy?’”

Astronomer Dan Lester at the University of Texas at Austin envisions loading a full 8-meter Single Aperture Far-Infrared Telescope (SAFIR) to probe deeper into the depths of protostars aboard an Ares V, or packing up a larger 16-meter version on the rocket.

Another proposal by Roger Brissenden of the Chandra X-ray Center includes calls for an 8-meter X-ray telescope dubbed Gen-X to hunt for the first black holes, stars and galaxies in the universe. The space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory, for comparison, has an aperture about 3 feet (1 meters) across.

Probing planets, deep space

Ares V rockets also pose a boon for interplanetary missions since the heavy-lift booster could offer a more direct flight.

According to the NRC report, using the rocket to launch NASA’s proposed Neptune Orbiter with Probes mission could negate the need to use a nuclear-electric engine or use Neptune’s atmosphere for braking during orbit insertion.

“The planetary community’s interested in performance for getting extra delta v to reduce the amount of trip time to the outer planets,” Steve Cookm NASA’s Ares project manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., has said.

Launching another mission, the Titan Explorer flight to send an orbiter, lander and blimp to the shrouded Saturnian moon, aboard an Ares V could shorten the years-long flight and allow the probe to use rocket engines, instead of atmospheric braking, to entire orbit, the NRC report stated.

“We could get incredible astronomy from this big rocket,” says Thronson, a professional dreamer. “I can’t wait.”

Source

Mars water might be the new Perrier. Photo: CC/Burns!

Perhaps NASA can bottle the stuff, and bring it back to Earth, for sale to elite consumers.

Planum Boreum, Mar’s north polar cap contains water ice “of a very high degree of purity,” according to an international study. Using radar data from the SHARAD (SHAllow RADar) instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), French researchers say the data point to 95 percent purity in the polar ice cap. The north polar cap is a dome of layered, icy materials, similar to the large ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica, consisting of layered deposits, with mostly ice and a small amount of dust. Combined, the north and south polar ice caps are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometers (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, making it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America’s Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. kms (5,439 miles).

via Lots of Pure Water Ice at Mars North Pole | Universe Today.

An impression of the TSSM orbiter set against a classic Cassini image (NASA)

Ambitious plans to send probes to the outer planets are being considered by US and European space officials.

One proposal envisages sending an orbiter to Saturn which would also drop a lander and a balloon on to the haze-shrouded moon Titan.

The other sees two separate orbiters despatched to investigate Jupiter and its icy moons – Europa and Ganymede.

Space agency officials will meet next week to decide which of the two plans should go forward for further study.

The respective space agencies’ two top science executives, Ed Weiler (Nasa) and David Southwood (Esa), are expected to announce a “winner” in February.

The mission, which would cost several billion dollars/euros to build and execute, would not get to the launch pad before 2020; and may never fly if the agencies decide there are other space missions in their future portfolios that they consider to be a higher research priority.

Mission leaves Earth in 2020 on Atlas heavy-lift rocket Would take 9 years to reach Saturn with Venus fly-by Nasa: responsible for 1.6-tonne instrumented orbiter Esa: would provide balloon and hydrocarbon lake lander (above) Orbiter to tour Saturn system before entering Titan orbit Tour allows further studies of Enceladus and its plumes Will need to raise the high scientific bar set by Cassini (NASA/ESA)

Reports from the two competing definition teams were published online this week by Esa.

The documents provide detailed descriptions of the science rationale and goals of the different mission concepts, and how Nasa and Esa would dovetail their participation.

The Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM), as it is currently known, would follow up the remarkable discoveries made by the Nasa/Esa Cassini-Huygens mission which continues to operate at the ringed planet.

The concept envisages another multi-instrumented orbiter that would make the moons Titan and Enceladus its chief targets.

Cassini has sent back data that indicates Titan is akin to a primitive – albeit frozen – Earth. It has a thick atmosphere and is rich in organic (carbon-rich) molecules. Recent revelations at Enceladus include the discovery that its southern polar region has hot spots that spew huge jets of water-ice into space. Scientists think there may be an ocean of liquid water beneath the moon’s surface.

The TSSM orbiter would dip into Titan’s atmosphere and the plumes at Enceladus to “taste” their chemistry. The orbiter would also drop a lander on to Titan to float on one of moon’s lakes of liquid ethane and methane. In addition, a balloon would be injected into the atmosphere to take pictures and sample the “air” as it drifted with the wind.

The Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) proposes Nasa and Esa combine efforts in the Jovian system. Major targets here would be the Galilean moons Europa and Ganymede. Europa in particular has long been at the top of scientists’ wish lists to visit with sophisticated instrumentation.

Nasa: Jupiter Europa Orbiter could launch on an Atlas in 2020 Esa: Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter (above) lofted by an Ariane Probes use Venus gravity assist to arrive 6 years later Orbiters conduct joint observations at other Jupiter moons Would finally settle into orbits around dedicated targets Studies will focus on Europa's and Ganymede's interiors End destructions will allow unique measurement opportunities (NASA/ESA)

The ice moon’s crack-riven surface is also thought to hide a sub-glacial ocean (but on a larger scale to Enceladus). Researchers would love to get close enough to start to assess the habitability of this strange world.

The EJSM team suggests the US and Europe both send orbiters. Nasa would despatch the Jupiter Europa Orbiter (JEO); Esa would send the Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter (JGO).

The two spacecraft would conduct joint observations on occasions but only Nasa’s probe would spend time around Europa which is known to have a severe radiation environment. The spacecraft will need specific shielding to protect sensitive electronic systems.

The JEO and JGO would end their missions by crashing into their respective moons.

The concepts have risen out of several years of discussion on both sides of the Atlantic.

US inspirations have been channelled through Nasa’s Outer Planets Assessment Group (Opag).

The European initiative comes under Esa’s Cosmic Vision programme which seeks to map out space science endeavours through to 2025.

Initial ideas evolved under titles known as Tandem (now incorporated into TSSM) and Laplace (now in EJSM).

The Paris-based agency has set aside 650m euros (at 2007 prices) for a large class mission. The TSSM and EJSM concepts would fall into that category.

But whichever is chosen to go forward for further feasibility work will ultimately have to compete with concepts in astrophysics.

There are joint Esa/Nasa proposals on the table for a next-generation X-ray telescope, known as the International X-ray Observatory (Ixo); and for a mission to study gravitational waves in space, known as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (Lisa).

These concepts are trying to win the same funding opportunity.

Peter Falkner, who leads the planetary exploration studies section at Esa, told BBC News: “The [planetary missions] will go to down-selection with Ixo and Lisa; and then – under the current plan – two will be selected for definition phase in parallel, still in competition, and out of that will emerge a winner that will go forward to implementation.”

Source

Moon homes might look like this. Photo: CC/Brian Yap

The VTech Moon brick.

Where can I sign-up for my “igloo on the Moon” getaway? — mb

Dwellings in colonies on the moon one day may be built with new, highly durable bricks developed by students from the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. via Lunar Rock-Like Material May Someday House Moon Colonies.

The famous full-color image of the Earth rising over the moon. (NASA)

It hadn’t been a very good year.

Nineteen-sixty-eight saw the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, riots across the world and the My Lai massacre.

But on Christmas Eve, Americans turned on their TVs to see perhaps the first good news all year: Apollo 8 astronauts reading from the Book of Genesis as they became the first humans to orbit the moon.

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light,” read Lunar Module Pilot William Anders.

His crewmates, Commander Frank Borman and Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, followed with more verses.

The Apollo 8 crew wasn’t even supposed to have gone to the moon. The mission was planned as a low-Earth orbit to test the Lunar Module, the lander later used by Apollo 11 and subsequent missions to land on the moon’s surface.

But production delays meant the Lunar Module wouldn’t be ready for testing until February 1969. Since the orbiter, the Command Module, had already been thoroughly tested, a decision was made in August 1968 to send Apollo 8 into lunar orbit instead.

That gave the crew only four months to rush through whole new round of training. It’s estimated they spent seven hours training for each actual hour of the mission. The night before the launch, they were visited by hero aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, as Lindbergh recounted his famous 1927 solo transatlantic flight.

The Saturn V rocket launched on Dec. 21 without major incident. One the way to the moon, Borman got sick, which sent globules of bodily fluids floating around the cabin — the first documented case of space sickness.

Nearly three days after launch, the braking engines fired and the Apollo 8 capsule went into orbit around the moon. The astronauts gazed down upon the lunar craters, the first humans to see them from so close.

“The Moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand,” Lovell reported back to Mission Control.

The Apollo 8 crew standing in front of a simulator during training. Left to right: Jim Lovell, Bill Anders and Frank Borman. (NASA)

The astronauts orbited around the moon a total of 10 times over 20 hours, reading from Genesis during the ninth orbit. The journey back to Earth, which began on Christmas Day, was uneventful, though hardly calm; the astronauts themselves had given their mission only a 50-50 chance of succeeding.

But when they got back to Earth, they were hailed as conquering heroes. Time magazine named the trio Men of the Year. Life magazine called their famous color photograph of the Earth rising over the moon one of the “100 photos that changed the world.”

Notable atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair sued NASA over the Genesis reading, but the court ruled it had no jurisdiction over events in space. And Borman got an anonymous telegram that said simply: “Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968.”

Forty Christmas Eves later, it’s best to remember the line that Borman closed the Genesis reading with: “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas — and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”

Source

The tiger stripe fractures (bottom right) are places where the surface spreads

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco

A US space agency (Nasa) probe has witnessed a moon of Saturn do something very unusual and Earth-like.

Pictures of the icy satellite Enceladus suggest its surface splits and spreads apart – just like the ocean floor on our planet splits to create new crust.

The information was released at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Evidence is mounting that liquid water lies beneath the surface

The data from the Cassini spacecraft is said to strengthen the idea that Enceladus harbours a sub-surface sea.

“Bit by bit, we’re accumulating the evidence that there is liquid water on Enceladus,” said Carolyn Porco, team leader of the Cassini imaging group and one of the senior scientists on the mission.

The observation on Earth that the sea floor is splitting at mid-ocean ridges and moving apart was one of the great scientific discoveries of the 20th Century; and became a key feature in the theory of plate tectonics – the idea that massive slabs of the Earth’s surface move around and are recycled.

Cassini sees something very similar on Enceladus.

The surface of this snow-white moon is riven with cracks – dubbed tiger stripes – at its south pole.

Dr Paul Helfenstein from Cornell University used digital maps of this region to reconstruct a history of the stripes, pushing the fractures around on a computer screen until they fitted together like pieces in a puzzle.

He found that sections of the cracks had clearly moved from their original locations.

Dr Helfenstein told BBC News that the resemblance to the Earth process was remarkable.

“What’s different about them is that spreading ridges on the Earth typically spread symmetrically about a rift,” he said.

“On Enceladus, what we see is a type of spreading but it is strongly asymmetric – it’s like a conveyor belt, in which, if it’s true it’s coming up from a convection well, it seems to be only pushing in one direction. It does happen on Earth, but only in very peculiar situations.”

On Earth, sea-floor spreading is fuelled by molten rock upwelling from deep inside the Earth.

On Enceladus, the scientists speculate the liquid may be water.

If that is the case, it makes this moon one of the most exciting targets for future exploration.

Enceladus is already known to have some of the fundamental chemistry required to make and sustain life. Liquid water currently is the major missing ingredient.

Dr Porco commented: “We first discovered this region in early 2005 and now it’s nearly four years later, so it’s still kind of brand new; but already there are some of us who really want to go back with a spacecraft that focuses on the south pole of Enceladus and investigates whether or not it is a site of either pre-biotic or biotic processes.”

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7784902.stm

WASHINGTON (AP) — Astronomers looking at the spectacular supersonic plumes of gas and dust shooting off one of Saturn’s moons say there are strong hints of liquid water, a key building block of life.

This 2007 photo by NASA's Cassini probe shows plumes of gas and dust shooting off Enceladus. (NASA)

One of Saturn's moons, Enceladus is the white orb in the middle of this image. (NASA)

Their research, appearing in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, adds to the growing push to explore further the moon Enceladus, as one of the solar system’s most compelling places for potential life.

Using images from NASA’s Cassini probe, astronomers had already figured that the mysterious plumes shooting from Enceladus’ icy terrain contain water vapor. New calculations suggesting the gas and dust spew at speeds faster-than-sound make the case for liquid, said study lead author Candice Hansen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California. Her team calculated the plumes travel more than 1,360 mph.

More on the story, after the jump: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/11/26/saturn.moon.water.ap/index.html