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Tag: NASA

  • Mars Rover Curiosity Pounds a Rock

    Mars Rover Curiosity Pounds a Rock

    NASA today announced that Mars rover Curiosity is closer than ever to the first full use of its hammering drill. Over the weekend the rover completed a successful test of the drill’s percussive action.

    The “drill-on-rock checkout” left a mark on the rock, named “John Klein,” chosen as the target for the first drill sampling of rock material in the history of Mars exploration. It was another step in the drill testing announced last week.

    There is still one more test to be performed before the actual drilling can commence. A “mini drill” test will use both the rotary and percussive capabilities of the drill to create a ring of rock powder around a hole. The test will, say researchers, allow them to test the material and see if it is a dry powder that can be tested by Curiosity’s sample handling equipment.

    The rover team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been preparing to use Curiosity’s drill for almost two Earth months now. The event has been carefully prepared for in detail, with researchers taking time to choose a suitable rock target and test every aspect of the drill. Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Richard Cook has called the event “this mission’s most challenging activity since the landing.”

  • Cassini Spots Smog Formation on Titan

    Cassini Spots Smog Formation on Titan

    A new paper using data from NASA‘s Cassini probe has described in detail how aerosols begin to form in the highest part of the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. The research, say scientists, could help predict how “smoggy aerosol layers” behave on Earth.

    The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, states that the smog on Titan begins to form when solar radiation excites nitrogen and methane molecules in the ionosphere, creating a “soup” of negative and positive ions. Collisions among these molecules allows them to grow into more complex aerosols, which coagulate when they reach a lower part of the atmosphere. Eventually the molecules produce the hydrocarbon rain that famously creates the lakes seen on Titan’s surface.

    The researchers, based at the University of Reims, looked at data from three different Cassini instruments during the study. Data from Cassini’s plasma spectrometer, its ion and neutral mass spectrometer, and its radio and plasma wave science experiment were examined and compared to data from the Huygens probe, which descended to the surface of Titan in 2005.

    Titan is the only other object in the soar system known to have stable liquid on its surface. In December of 2012 the ESA released a high-definition photo of a river valley that runs for over 400 km (248 miles) on the surface of Titan. The picture above shows a flash of sunlight that is reflected off a lake on Titan. The phenomenon is known as a specular reflection.

  • Space Life Weakens Immune Systems, Shows Study

    Space Life Weakens Immune Systems, Shows Study

    A new study performed aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has shown that being in space weakens astronauts’ immune systems. Researchers hope the findings can help prevent disease for those of us still on the planet.

    European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Reiter performed the experiments while on the ISS, as seen in the video below. Human immune cells were allowed to float freely in microgravity while others were placed in a centrifuge that simulated gravity. The cells in the centrifuge were found to be more healthy than those left to float.

    Analysis showed that a transmitter called the Rel/NF-kB pathway stopped working in microgravity, preventing immune cells from working correctly.

    “Normally, when our bodies sense an invasion, a cascade of reactions occur that are controlled by the information held in our genes, similar to an instruction book,” said Isabelle Walther, a researcher with the Space Biology Group in Zurich, Switzerland. “Finding which gene does what is like looking for the right key to fit a keyhole, without having found the keyhole yet.”

    Researchers stated that these findings could help disease research in two ways. First, being able to deactivate genes associated with the immune system could help patients who suffer from autoimmune diseases. Second, drugs could be developed to target genes that fight specific diseases.

    “We are working towards a finer control of disease,” said Millie Hughes-Fulford, a NASA astronaut and an investigator on the research. “If you imagine our immune system responding to diseases as a waterfall, up until now we have been fighting disease at the bottom of the waterfall. In the future we could target the raindrops before they have a chance to cascade into waterfalls. We live in exciting times.”

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  • Asteroid to Give Earth a Near Miss on February 15

    Asteroid to Give Earth a Near Miss on February 15

    NASA this weekend revealed that an asteroid named 2012 DA14 will come very close to Earth on February 15. The object will swing within 27,700 kilometers (17,200 miles) of the Earth’s surface – close enough to pass within the geosynchronous satellites that orbit the planet, and only around one-thirteenth the distance from the Earth to the moon.

    NASA researchers stated that, according to their observations, there is no chance the asteroid will collide with the Earth. It will cruise by at around 7.8 kilometers per second (17,400 miles per hour). The flyby will set a record for a close approach of an object of such size. Astronomers estimate that such an event occurs an average of every 40 years. A collision with an object the size of 2012 DA14 is expected an average of every 1,200 years.

    According to observations of the asteroid’s brightness, object itself is not large. It is estimated to be only 45 meters (150 feet) across. When it passes closest to Earth on February 15, it will appear only as a point of light. Though it will be too faint to see with the naked eye, it should be visible with binoculars or a small telescope. Though the best viewing can be seen in Indonesia, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Australia will get a good view during the object’s closest approach.

    2012 DA14 has only been known of for one year. In February 2012 astronomers at the La Sagra Sky Survey discovered the asteroid, which had just made a distant passage of Earth. The object’s orbital period (or, “year”) is 368 days, which very close to the Earth’s orbital period of 365 days. This year’s near-miss of Earth will alter the asteroid’s orbital period, shortening it to around 317 days.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • Cassini Spotted Storm Eating Itself on Saturn

    Cassini Spotted Storm Eating Itself on Saturn

    NASA‘s Cassini probe has spotted a storm on Saturn that has “consumed” itself. The massive storm whirled around the planet until it ran into its own tail end and dispersed. A new paper on the event, published in the journal Icarus, describes it as the first time researchers have ever seen such a thing happen in the solar system.

    “This Saturn storm behaved like a terrestrial hurricane – but with a twist unique to Saturn,” said Andrew Ingersoll, co-author of the paper and a Cassini imaging team member. “Even the giant storms at Jupiter don’t consume themselves like this, which goes to show that nature can play many awe-inspiring variations on a theme and surprise us again and again.”

    The storm was first detected in December of 2010, forming from warm gas in the planet’s atmosphere. It began moving west along 33 degrees north latitude, spinning clockwise. The storm eventually stretched 190,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) around the planet. With no mountains or other land to impede it, the storm eventually ran into itself in June 2011 and faded away.

    “This thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn was a beast,” said Kunio Sayanagi, lead author on the paper and a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University. “The storm maintained its intensity for an unusually long time. The storm head itself thrashed for 201 days, and its updraft erupted with an intensity that would have sucked out the entire volume of Earth’s atmosphere in 150 days. And it also created the largest vortex ever observed in the troposphere of Saturn, expanding up to 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) across.”

    Though the storm was the longest-running of the massive storms that occur in Saturn’s northern hemisphere every 30 (Earth) years, it isn’t the longest storm ever detected on the gas giant. That honor goes to a storm 100 times smaller, which formed in the southern hemisphere’s “storm alley” and lasted 334 days in 2009.

    “Cassini’s stay in the Saturn system has enabled us to marvel at the power of this storm,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “We had front-row seats to a wonderful adventure movie and got to watch the whole plot from start to finish. These kinds of data help scientists compare weather patterns around our solar system and learn what sustains and extinguishes them.”

  • Late Planet-Forming Star Spotted by Herschel

    Late Planet-Forming Star Spotted by Herschel

    NASA and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Space Telescope has spotted a planet-forming star that wasn’t thought to be possible.

    The star, named TW Hydrae, is estimated to be 10 million years old – older than the age at which stars are thought to be able to produce planets. However, the star still has an accretion disc massive enough to possiblly produce planets. The new findings appear in a paper published recently in the journal Nature.

    “We didn’t expect to see so much gas around this star,” said Edwin Bergin, lead on the new research and an astronomer at the University of Michigan. “Typically stars of this age have cleared out their surrounding material, but this star still has enough mass to make the equivalent of 50 Jupiters,”

    The new TW Hydrae data comes out of a new technique for estimating the mass of planet-forming discs. Researchers used the Herschel telescope to analyze the light coming from the star and pick out hydrogen deuteride gas, which emits light at the longer infrared wavelengths that Herschel can detect. The measurements have provided the most precise measurement of the disc’s mass to date.

    “Before, we had to use a proxy to guess the gas quantity in the planet-forming disks,” said Paul Goldsmith, project scientist for Herschel at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL). “This is another example of Herschel’s versatility and sensitivity yielding important new results about star and planet formation.”

    The researchers stated that knowing the mass of a star’s gas disc is “crucial” to understanding how planets may form around it. Though they don’t know what TW Hydrae’s massive disc will mean for the system’s future, the astronomers stated that the new data has helped define “a range” of possible future planet configurations.

    “The new results are another important step in understanding the diversity of planetary systems in our universe,” said Bergin. “We are now observing systems with massive Jupiters, super-Earths, and many Neptune-like worlds. By weighing systems at their birth, we gain insight into how our own solar system formed with just one of many possible planetary configurations.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • NASA to Launch ISS Instrument to Monitor Ocean Winds

    NASA to Launch ISS Instrument to Monitor Ocean Winds

    NASA announced this week that it will launch an instrument called the ISS-RapidScat to the International Space Station (ISS) next year to measure ocean winds. The instrument, originally built to test NASA;s QuikScat satellite, will measure the Earth’s ocean surface wind speed and direction. The data will improve weather forecasts and hurricane monitoring.

    “The ability for NASA to quickly reuse this hardware and launch it to the space station is a great example of a low-cost approach that will have high benefits to science and life here on Earth,” said Mike Suffredini, NASA’s International Space Station program manager.

    Scatterometers measure the scattering effect produced when scanning the Earth’s surface using a microwave radar sensor. The previous wind data instrument, the QuikScat, stopped collecting ocean wind data in 2009 after operating for 10 years. No replacement will be available soon, which is why NASA adapted existing QuikScat hardware.

    “ISS-RapidScat represents a low-cost approach to acquiring valuable wind vector data for improving global monitoring of hurricanes and other high-intensity storms,” said Howard Eisen, ISS-RapidScat project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “By leveraging the capabilities of the International Space Station and recycling leftover hardware, we will acquire good science data at a fraction of the investment needed to launch a new satellite.”

    The ISS-RapidScat will be launched to the ISS on a SpaceX Dragon cargo mission. It will be installed on the end of the ISS’s Columbus laboratory and have measurement accuracy “similar” to QuikScat. The instrument is expected operate for two years.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/JSC)

  • NASA to Remember Fallen Astronauts on February 1

    NASA to Remember Fallen Astronauts on February 1

    NASA announced today that its yearly “Day of Remembrance” for fallen astronauts will be held on February 1. The date marks the 10th anniversary of the day the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Flags at NASA facilities will be flown at half-staff on that day.

    The tribute will be used to honor the astronauts who died while working with the space program. Astronauts from the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, as well Apollo 1 will be a part of the remembrance. An observance will take place at Arlington National Cemetary on February 1, with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and other senior NASA officials in attendance.

    A wreath-laying ceremony will also take place that day at 10 am EST at the Space Mirror Memorial in the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. The Space Mirror Memorial was dedicated in 1991, to honor astronauts who lost their lives in the space program. It has been declared a National Memorial by the U.S. congress and is maintained by the non-profit Astronauts memorial Foundation, which is also hosting the observance on Friday.

    The Kennedy ceremony will be streaming live on NASA Television. A tribute video for fallen astronauts prepared by NASA can be seen below, and an interactive slideshow is also available.

  • Mars Rover Curiosity Braces For Drilling

    Mars Rover Curiosity Braces For Drilling

    For over one month now, Mars rover Curiosity has been preparing to use its hammering drill for the first time. It now appears that the rover’s first drill test is now imminent.

    Researchers announced that they have placed the drill onto a series of locations and pressed down on it with Curiosity’s arm. This “pre-load testing allowed engineers to check the force applied to the drill and cross-check it with their predictions. The next step is a pre-load test at night, to make sure that temperature changes do not add to the stress on the rover‘s arm. Temperatures at Curiosity’s location can range from 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) to to 65 degrees Celsius (85 degrees Fehrenheit).

    “We don’t plan on leaving the drill in a rock overnight once we start drilling, but in case that happens, it is important to know what to expect in terms of stress on the hardware,” said Daniel Limonadi, the lead systems engineer for Curiosity’s surface sampling and science system at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “This test is done at lower pre-load values than we plan to use during drilling, to let us learn about the temperature effects without putting the hardware at risk.”

    The rest of the week will be filled with hardware checks and an evaluation of the rock that has been selected as the first drilling site. Two weeks ago a flat, veined rock named “John Klein” was chosen for the honor.

    “We are proceeding with caution in the approach to Curiosity’s first drilling,” said Limonadi. “This is challenging. It will be the first time any robot has drilled into a rock to collect a sample on Mars.”

  • NASA Joins Euclid Dark Universe Mission

    NASA Joins Euclid Dark Universe Mission

    NASA announced this week that it has joined the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid mission. The mission will investigate dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe.

    In 2020, the mission will launch the Euclid space telescope, which will spend six years mapping and measuring as many as 2 billion galaxies that cover one-third of the sky. The hope is that Euclid will be able to provide insight into the evolution of the universe and the influence of dark matter and dark energy.

    “ESA’s Euclid mission is designed to probe one of the most fundamental questions in modern cosmology, and we welcome NASA’s contribution to this important endeavor, the most recent in a long history of cooperation in space science between our two agencies,” said Alvaro Gimenez, ESA’s Director of Science and Robotic Exploration.

    Though NASA’s part in the Euclid mission is still being developed, the agency will be providing 16 infrared detectors and four spare detectors for one of Euclid’s science instruments.

    The Euclid spacecraft will be launched into orbit around the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, a point where the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth can help the satellite maintain a stationary position behind the Earth. The spacecraft will map dark matter, using precise measurements of distant galaxies.

    Dark Matter makes up around 85% of the universe. It is called dark matter because it does not interact with light, and is made up of unknown particles. It does, however, interact with known matter through gravity, binding galaxies together. Dark energy, on the other hand, is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Even less about dark energy is known than about dark matter.

    (Image courtesy ESA/C. Carreau)

  • Mars Rover Curiosity Takes Nighttime Photos

    NASA announced today that Mars rover Curiosity has used the camera on its arm to take pictures at night. The photos were of a rock named “Sayunei,” which Curiosity had purposely scuffed with its left-front wheel to uncover dust-free materials.

    This was the first time the rover has taken photos at night using the white and ultraviolet lights on its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) instrument. The MAHLI is an adjustable-focus camera that has its own LED light sources.

    “The purpose of acquiring observations under ultraviolet illumination was to look for fluorescent minerals,” said Ken Edgett, MAHLI principal investigator at Malin Space Science Systems. “The science team is still assessing the observations. If something looked green, yellow, orange or red under the ultraviolet illumination, that’d be a more clear-cut indicator of fluorescence.”

    “Sayunei” is located in a low-lying area NASA has named “Yellowknife Bay.” The area is the one chosen by the rover team to be the site of Curiosity’s first test of its hammering drill. Last week, researchers announced that a rock in “Yellowknife Bay” named “John Klein” has been tentatively chosen to be the subject of the rover’s first drilling. Richard Cook, the Mars Science Laboratory project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory described the drilling test at the “most challenging activity since the landing.”

    The photo below is of “Sayunei” under ultraviolet light:

    A mars rock under ultraviolet light

    (Images courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

  • NASA Telescope Finds Evidence of Solar Braiding

    NASA Telescope Finds Evidence of Solar Braiding

    NASA this week announced that it has found the first clear evidence of energy transfer from the sun’s magnetic field to its corona. Called “solar braiding,” the process was only a theory until these new observations.

    The evidence comes from the highest resolution images of the sun‘s corona ever taken. The photos were taken by NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) telescope.

    “Scientists have tried for decades to understand how the sun’s dynamic atmosphere is heated to millions of degrees,” said Jonathan Cirtain, Hi-C principal investigator and a heliophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “Because of the level of solar activity, we were able to clearly focus on an active sunspot, and obtain some remarkable images. Seeing this for the first time is a major advance in understanding how our sun continuously generates the vast amount of energy needed to heat its atmosphere.”

    Cirtain and his colleagues assert that the new findings could lead to better predictions for space weather, since the sun’s magnetic field drives solar eruptions that can reach the Earth and potentially disrupt satellites.

    The Hi-C telescope is a sub-orbital satellite that flew for only 10 minutes in July 2012. During that time, it took 165 photos of an active region of the sun’s corona. New optics grinding and surface polishing techniques were developed for the Hi-C’s mirrors. The telescope’s resolution is around five times that of the one aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which already takes amazingly high-definition pictures of the sun.

    “The Hi-C observations are part of a technology demonstration that will enable a future generation of telescopes to solve the fundamental questions concerning the heating of the solar atmosphere and the origins of space weather, “said Jeffrey Newmark, sounding rocket program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

    (Image courtesy NASA)

  • Mars Rover Opportunity Celebrates 9 Years on Mars

    Though the focus of 2012 was the new Curiosity rover, NASA’s Opportunity rover is still exploring the Martian landscape. The rover has now been examining the red planet for nine years.

    This week NASA revealed that Opportunity is currently examining veined rocks on the rim of an ancient crater named “Endeavor.” The rover is examining the area, called “Matijevic Hill,” and has found evidence of a wet environment in Mars’ past, and a less acidic environment than was found earlier in the rover’s mission.

    Opportunity has now driven 35.46 kilometers (22.03 miles) since it landed on Mars in January 2004. The rover’s primary mission was only three months long. It was to drive 600 meters (2,000 feet) and determine whether the area surrounding it had ever been wet. Opportunity has now operated for 36 times longer than what was originally planned. Since that time, researchers have driven the rover to successively larger craters, examining soil exposed from successively older layers of Mars.

    “What’s most important is not how long it has lasted or even how far it has driven, but how much exploration and scientific discovery Opportunity has accomplished,” said John Callas, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover Project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

    Opportunity’s twin, the Spirit rover, also operated past its original mission, though it hasn’t fared as well as Opportunity. In 2009 Spirit became stuck in soft soil, and communications with the rover ceased in 2010.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.)

  • Climate Change is Threatening the Amazon Rainforest, Says NASA

    Climate Change is Threatening the Amazon Rainforest, Says NASA

    A NASA-led study has shown that a part of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of California is still suffering from a “megadrought” that began in 2005. Researchers cited this and damage due to drought recurrences in the Amazon during the past decade as evidence that the rainforest may face “large-scale degradation due to climate change.”

    The study looked at satellite microwave radar data from 2000 to 2009, measurements of rainfall from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, and moisture content from the rainforest canopy from the Seawinds scatterometer on NASA’s QuikScat satellite.

    During the summer of 2005, over 270,000 square miles of old-growth forest in the Amazon experienced “extensive, severe drought.” This megadrought caused changes in the forest canopy, including possible dieback of branches and tree falls. Though rainfall levels recovered in the years after the drought, much of the damage to the forest canopy remained until the next drought in 2010.

    “The biggest surprise for us was that the effects appeared to persist for years after the 2005 drought,” said Yadvinder Malhi, co-author of the study at the University of Oxford. “We had expected the forest canopy to bounce back after a year with a new flush of leaf growth, but the damage appeared to persist right up to the subsequent drought in 2010.”

    The study shows that around 30% of the Amazon basin’s total forest area was affected by the 2005 drought. Almost half of the entire Amazon rainforest was affected by the 2010 drought. The drought rate in the area has been abnormally high during the past decade. Research has shown that rainfall over the southern Amazon rainforest fell by nearly 3.2% from 1970 to 1998.

    Malhi and his colleagues attribute recent Amazonian droughts to long-term warming of tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures.

    “In effect, the same climate phenomenon that helped form hurricanes Katrina and Rita along U.S. southern coasts in 2005 also likely caused the severe drought in southwest Amazonia,” said Sassan Saatchi, leader on the research at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “An extreme climate event caused the drought, which subsequently damaged the Amazonian trees.

    “Our results suggest that if droughts continue at five- to 10-year intervals or increase in frequency due to climate change, large areas of the Amazon forest are likely to be exposed to persistent effects of droughts and corresponding slow forest recovery. This may alter the structure and function of Amazonian rainforest ecosystems.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • Planetary Resources Shows Off Some New Asteroid Mining Tech

    Remember Planetary Resources? It’s the startup funded by the Google co-founders, James Cameron and others. The company’s goal is to send mining robots into space and collect valuable minerals and elements from the numerous asteroids that fly around our solar system.

    Now, it’s been a while since the company has last updated the public on what it’s doing, but a video uploaded over the weekend should give you a good idea of the tech the company is investing in for its future goals of mining asteroids.

    The tech on display today is called the Arkyd-100 Space Telescope. The device will be a prospector of sorts that will look for potentially mineral-rich asteroids. The team says the 11 kg telescope is “the most advanced spacecraft per kilogram that exists today.

    Be sure to check out the tour of some of the facilities at the end that show some of the work being done with lasers and prototyping. It’s all very impressive.

    I’m not going to pretend I understood everything that he just said, but I do understand that what these guys are doing is extremely important. Much of Earth’s resources are finite. We can alleviate the stress put on our own resources by collecting the same, and maybe even new, resources from asteroids and other heavenly bodies that orbit around earth, our sun, or any of the other planets in the solar system.

    Let’s just hope the technology doesn’t alter the orbits of asteroids and send them straight to Earth. I don’t think a Steven Tyler ballad can save us from that.

  • Mars Lake May Once Have Filled Martian Crater

    While Mars Rover Curiosity is busy drilling rocks, NASA‘s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has provided new evidence of a possibly wet underground environment on Mars.

    The new evidence comes from Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) data of a location known as McLaughlin Crater. The crater, which is 92 kilometers (57 miles) in diameter and 2.2 kilometers (1.4 miles) deep, appears to have once held a lake that was fed by groundwater. Researchers looking at the data point to layered, flat rocks at the botom of the crater conaining carbonate and clay minerals as evidence of the ancient lake. However, the lack of large inflow channels mean the source of the lake must have come from below.

    “Taken together, the observations in McLaughlin Crater provide the best evidence for carbonate forming within a lake environment instead of being washed into a crater from outside,” said Joseph Michalski, lead author of a paper on the findings published this week in the journal Nture Geoscience. “A number of studies using CRISM data have shown rocks exhumed from the subsurface by meteor impact were altered early in Martian history, most likely by hydrothermal fluids. These fluids trapped in the subsurface could have periodically breached the surface in deep basins such as McLaughlin Crater, possibly carrying clues to subsurface habitability.”

    On Earth, groundwater-fed lakes usually occur at low elevations. McLaughlin Crater sits at the low end of a regional slope several kilometers long, meaning it fits the profile for such a process.

    “The MRO team has made a concerted effort to get highly processed data products out to members of the science community like Dr. Michalski for analysis,” said Scott Murchie, CRISM Principal Investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “New results like this show why that effort is so important.”

  • The Moon Landing Wasn’t Faked, But Here’s Another Reason Why

    There are still people out there who believe that the 1969 Moon landing was a hoax, perpetrated by the U.S. government and that everyone involved has successfully kept that fact from being exposed and proven for over 40 years. If you believe this, feel free to express those feelings to Buzz Aldrin.

    Anyway, it’s garbage. But it’s always nice to see some guy explain why it’s garbage in a simple, well-constructed video.

    Simply put: The American Government didn’t fake the Moon landing because they couldn’t have faked the moon landing. Technologically speaking.

    “Please understand, I’m not saying this defend the honor of the United States. The U.S Government lies all the time about all kinds of things. And if they haven’t lied to you today, maybe they haven’t had coffee,” says our narrator.

    But the fact remains. In 1969, we had the technology to send a man to moon but we didn’t have the technology to fake send a man to the moon.

    [sgcollins via Gizmodo]

  • Mapping The Moon And Mars Discussed At Google

    Google put up a new At Google talk with Ross Beyer from the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute and Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames Research Center, who discusses making maps to explore the Earth, the Moon and Mars.

    “High-quality planetary maps and 3D terrain models have become essential for NASA to plan exploration missions and conduct science,” says Google in the video description. “This is particularly true for robotic missions to the Moon and Mars, where maps are used for site selection, traverse planning, and planetary science. This is also important for studies of climate change on Earth, where maps are used to track environmental change (such as polar ice movement).”

    “In this talk, we will describe how the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames builds highly accurate, large-scale planetary maps and 3D terrain models from orbital imagery using novel statistical stereographic and photometric techniques,” it says. “Orbital imagery includes data captured by the Apollo missions, on-going NASA and international missions, and commercial providers (such as Digital Globe). The mapmaking software that we have developed (Vision Workbench, Ames Stereo Pipeline, Neo-Geography Toolkit) is available as open-source and is widely used by scientists and mission planners.”

    More recent At Google Talks here.

  • Titan’s Craters Could be Filled With Hydrocarbon Sand, Says NASA

    Titan’s Craters Could be Filled With Hydrocarbon Sand, Says NASA

    New findings from NASA‘s Cassini probe have revealed that Saturn’s moon Titan may look younger than it really is. Dunes of hydrocarbon sand have been slowly filling up the craters that pockmark the moon.

    “Most of the Saturnian satellites – Titan’s siblings – have thousands and thousands of craters on their surface,” said Catherine Neish, a Cassini radar team associate based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “So far on Titan, of the 50 percent of the surface that we’ve seen in high resolution, we’ve only found about 60 craters. It’s possible that there are many more craters on Titan, but they are not visible from space because they are so eroded. We typically estimate the age of a planet’s surface by counting the number of craters on it (more craters means an older surface). But if processes like stream erosion or drifting sand dunes are filling them in, it’s possible that the surface is much older that it appears.”

    The new research is the first quantitative estimate of how much the weather on Titan has eroded its surface. The moon is the only one known in our solar system to have a thick atmosphere. It is also known to have seas of organic compounds, such as ethane and methane, on its surface.

    Methane is broken down in Titan’s atmosphere by sunlight, then recombined into more complex hydrocarbons. These molecules form an orange smog that envelops the planet. Some of the larger particles from the atmosphere, say scientists, rain down and become bound together into an exotic form of sand.

    “Since the sand appears to be produced from the atmospheric methane, Titan must have had methane in its atmosphere for at least several hundred million years in order to fill craters to the levels we are seeing,” said Neish.

    Titan’s methane levels are somewhat of a mystery, however. Researchers estimate that current levels of methane on Titan would be broken down within tens of millions of years. This suggests that the moon either had much more methane in the past, or is replenishing its methane in some way.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/GSFC)

  • Mona Lisa Beamed to the Moon by NASA

    Mona Lisa Beamed to the Moon by NASA

    This week NASA announced it has beamed an image of the Mona Lisa to a satellite orbiting the moon. The image treveled almost 240,000 miles from the Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging (NGSLR) station at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter orbiting the moon.

    The transmission was a test of laser communication with the lunar satellite. The Mona Lisa was piggybacked on laser pulses that are normally sent LOLA’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) to track its position. The successful transmission was verified by sending the image back to Earth using the LRO’s radio telemetry system.

    “This is the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances,” said David Smith, LOLA principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use. In the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide.”

    Satellites around Earth are normally tracked using radio waves. The LRO is the only non-Earth satellite to be tracked by laser.

    “Because LRO is already set up to receive laser signals through the LOLA instrument, we had a unique opportunity to demonstrate one-way laser communication with a distant satellite,” said Xiaoli Sun, a LOLA scientist at Goddard.

    For the transmission, the Mona Lisa was split into an array of 152 x 200 pixels. The pixels were then converted into a shade of grey, then transmitted by laser pulse at a data rate of around 300 bits per second. The LRO’s LOLA instrument reconstructed the image based on the arrival times of the laser pulses from Earth. All of this was accomplished without interfering with the NGSLR’s tracking and the LOLA’s primary task: mapping the moon’s elevation and terrain.

  • NASA Looks For the Origin of Life at the Bottom of the Ocean

    NASA Looks For the Origin of Life at the Bottom of the Ocean

    NASA this week revealed that it is simulating the conditions believed to have created the organic molecules that may have been the precursors to life on Earth.

    An experiment at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is mimicking the conditions observed at hydrothermal vents in the deepest parts of the ocean. Glass tubes, thin barrels, and valves are sending carbon dioxide-rich ocean water and alkaline fluid through a sample of rock that simulates ancient volcanic ocean crust. The experiment runs at 100 times the pressure on the Earth’s surface and at around 90 degrees Celsius (200 degrees Fahrenheit) A detector system detects the compounds coming out of the set-up, keeping watch for organic compounds such as ethane and methane.

    “What we’re trying to do is to climb down and create the conditions for the very first steps to the beginning of life as we know it,” said Mike Russell, leader on the experiment and a senior geologist with the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Icy Worlds team at JPL. “That’s the hard part.”

    The Icy Worlds project is trying to learn more about potentially habitable environments like Mars, as well as liquid water environments on icy objects such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus, where signs of water ice have been found.

    The hydrothermal vent experiments are based on Russell’s 1989 theory that life on Earth may have begun at alkaline hydrothermal vents some 4 billion years ago. The carbon dioxide at these vents could have supplied the carbon needes to produce organic molecules. Evidence for this was found in 2000, when a vent showing signs of producing organic molecules was found in the Atlantic Ocean.

    “If this ocean experiment is successful, scientists would have a better handle on where to look for the building blocks of life on Earth and beyond, and what signatures we should be looking for of life and of habitable environments in the solar system,” said Isik Kanik, Icy Worlds Principal Investigator.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)