Category Archives: solar system

Clean. Very clean.

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Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet’s surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. Dr Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, will discuss the team’s analysis at a European Space Agency (ESA) meeting on 7 February 2012. The researchers have spent three years analysing data on Martian soil that was collected during the 2008 NASA Phoenix mission to Mars. Phoenix touched down in the northern arctic region of the planet to search for signs that it was habitable and to analyse ice and soil on the surface.

The results of the soil analysis at the Phoenix site suggest the surface of Mars has been arid for hundreds of millions of years, despite the presence of ice and the fact that previous research has shown that Mars may have had a warmer and wetter period in its earlier history more than three billion years ago. The team also estimated that the soil on Mars had been exposed to liquid water for at most 5,000 years since its formation billions of years ago. They also found that Martian and Moon soil is being formed under the same extremely dry conditions. …(SpaceRef)

IBEX vacuum cleaning

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A particle-gobbling probe has snared some alien travelers: tiny particles from interstellar space that, after being born from the ashes of an exploding star, breached a protective bubble blown by the sun and sailed into the jaws of the awaiting spacecraft.

“These are some first observations of interstellar material, really alien matter,” Dave McComas, a principal investigator for NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft, or IBEX, said January 31 in a NASA press conference announcing the findings. “This alien interstellar material is really the stuff that stars and planets and people — all of us — are made of,” said McComas, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. …(ScienceNews)

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A refreshing drink on the Moon?

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New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) reveal features at the Moon’s north and south poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness. Developed by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the LAMP instrument is sensitive on dim “starlight,” specifically the band of electro-magnetic frequencies emitted when hydrogen (which usually travels in pairs) is reduced to a single atom, usually when encountering other forms of radiation.
This Ly-α (Lyman-alpha) spectral line is peculiar to neutral hydrogen, the most basic and abundant element in the universe, is produced by light with a wavelength of 121.4 nm, a frequency below the narrow band of optical frequencies visible to the naked eye. By gathering data revealed by this all-pervasive indirect starlight LAMP can peer into so-called “permanently shadowed regions” (PSRs).
In repeated passes over the lunar poles using this method researchers have able to determine the presence of very fine structure, such as the likely porosity of lunar surface rock or the most likely textures of water frost in super-cold volatile traps, in permanent shadow from the Sun, and only in those places on the Moon not overwhelmed by direct or immediately indirect sunlight. (Lunar Pioneer)

 

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Look out for that boulder

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I guess I’ll never be able to walk on the Moon, but at least I can look at pictures. Not only from astronauts on the Moon, but from above as well. Here’s a picture from Apollo 17, and from above – LROC of course.

During their third and final EVA, the last walk the Moon on December 13, 1972, Cernan and Schmitt had the opportunity to sample “Tracy’s Rock,” or ‘Split Rock’, a hefty boulder that had, at some point in the relatively recent past, rolled down the south-facing wall of North Massif where it partly broke apart near the valley floor. It offered an opportunity to analyze and sample part of the high mountains imaged almost four decades later from LRO. … (Lunar Pioneer)

Holiday greetings from Saturn

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No team of reindeer, but radio signals flying clear across the solar system from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have delivered a holiday package of glorious images. The pictures, from Cassini’s imaging team, show Saturn’s largest, most colorful ornament, Titan, and other icy baubles in orbit around this splendid planet.

The release includes images of satellite conjunctions in which one moon passes in front of or behind another. Cassini scientists regularly make these observations to study the ever-changing orbits of the planet’s moons. But even in these routine images, the Saturnian system shines. A few of Saturn’s stark, airless, icy moons appear to dangle next to the orange orb of Titan, the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Titan’s atmosphere is of great interest because of its similarities to the atmosphere believed to exist long ago on the early Earth.

The images are online at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://ciclops.org. … (Cassini)