SPACE NEWS

SPACE NEWS 08
--within the Solar System
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. . See also: "The Drake Equation" on the likelihood of life elsewhere.

. . Click here for the clearest explanation I've found on dark energy & the expansion of the universe. (eXit to return)

See Here's our page on just the Space-Elevator concept.

Regardless of when Hubble stops being scientifically useful, it will remain safely in orbit until at least 2013.

The Mars Foundation's hope for humanity's future on Mars is neatly summed up by their slogan: "To arrive, survive and thrive!" Mars Foundation: http://www.marshome.org/

.NEWS.

Dec 18, 08: Evidence of a key mineral on Mars has been found at several locations on the planet's surface, suggesting that any microbial life that might have been there back when the planet was wetter could have lived comfortably. The findings offer up intriguing new sites for future missions to probe.

Dec 17, 08: A new telescope system featuring the world's largest digital camera will significantly increase the ability to find space rocks as it begins operation in Hawaii this month.

Dec 16, 08: Earth's atmosphere was known to "breathe" in a cycle lasting nearly a month. Now scientists say the planet takes a quick breath every few days.
. . The breathing-like activity is the result of high-speed solar wind disturbances that cause a recurrent expansion and contraction of Earth's atmosphere every few days, satellite observations show. This atmospheric mode could affect radio communication, orbiting satellites and possibly the Earth's climate, researchers say.
. . The expansion and contraction happens way up in the Earth's thermosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that extends from 96.5 to 483 km above the planet's surface. The thermosphere is constantly interacting with the sun's upper atmosphere as it expands. Extreme ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun was known to cause a 27-day expansion-and-contraction cycle by changing the thermosphere's density through heating.
. . The researchers determined that the cause of these shorter expansions and contractions was high-speed winds generated by relatively cool pockets on the sun's surface known as solar coronal holes, which periodically rotate around the solar surface.

Dec 16, 08: A 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 data from the Cassini spacecraft is said to strengthen the idea that Enceladus harbors a sub-surface sea. "Bit by bit, we're accumulating the evidence that there is liquid water on Enceladus."

Dec 16, 08: Observations from the international Cassini spacecraft suggest Saturn's largest moon may have active or recently active ice volcanoes.
. . Radar images point to flows on the surface of Titan that could result from volcanoes spewing chilled liquid from the interior, mission scientists reported. Scientists believe they would erupt with ammonia, methane and water instead of lava.
. . Data from the spectrometer instrument on Cassini found bright spots on two regions on Titan. In one of the regions, scientists found evidence of ammonia frost that they interpreted as coming from the interior.

Dec 16, 08: Data from the now-defunct NASA Phoenix Mars Lander is shedding light on the current water cycle on Mars, particularly how water moves between the surface and the atmosphere in the northern polar region.
. . "The water in the atmosphere goes away every night, and at the same time, particularly later in the mission" the amount of water stuck in soil would go up at night and come back down during the day.
. . The films of water stuck between the surface and the atmosphere could be an ideal habitat for potential Martian microbes. Though there is no solid evidence for life past or present on Mars, it's such clues of habitability that the probe was sent to look for. "There are microbes that live quite happily in that" on Earth.

Dec 16, 08: A surprising solar flare sent a stream of pure hydrogen at Earth. "We've detected a stream of perfectly intact hydrogen atoms shooting out of an X-class solar flare", said researcher Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "If we can understand how these atoms were produced, we'll be that much closer to understanding solar flares."
. . Solar flares occur when the sun's twisted magnetic fields suddenly release their stored energy. The energy jolts are classified into three categories, with X-class solar flares being major events that can trigger radio blackouts around the world and long-lasting radiation storms in the upper atmosphere. (M-class are medium-sized flares and C-class are small flares with few consequences on Earth.)
. . On the "Richter scale" of flares, which ranks X1 as a big event, the blast registered X9, making it one of the strongest flares over the past 30 years.
. . "No other elements were present, not even helium (the sun's second-most abundant atomic species). Pure hydrogen streamed past the spacecraft for a full 90 minutes." Next came 30 minutes of quiet. Then a second wave of particles enveloped the STEREO spacecraft. The astronomers said these particles were the ions typically produced by solar flares, including protons and heavier ions, such as ions of helium, oxygen and iron.
. . So how did hydrogen atoms survive the energy blast of a solar flare, which packs a punch equal to a hundred million hydrogen bombs? Turns out, the hydrogen atoms weren't so hardy. The researchers think the atoms were obliterated, beginning their journey toward Earth in pieces, as protons and electrons. "Before they escaped the sun's atmosphere, however, some of the protons captured an electron, forming intact hydrogen atoms."
. . Mewaldt said that all strong flares might emit hydrogen bursts, but scientists just haven't noticed them before now.

Dec 15, 08: The Huygens probe has captured an image of what may be the first drop of liquid ever observed on an extraterrestrial surface. The snap is important evidence that liquids may exist on the surface of other planets and moons, not just frozen lakes. And liquid is more likely habitat for extraterrestrial life.
. . Among the pictures snapped by the Huygens probe after landing on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005, one appears to show a dewdrop made of methane that briefly formed on the edge of the probe itself. Scientists think heat from the probe caused humid air to rise and condense on the cold edge of the craft.
. . Microbes that eat methane thrive on Earth, and scientists think pools of methane could be comfortable homes for similar organisms on Titan.
. . The hundreds of images snapped by Huygens, from the time it hit the atmosphere until its power ran out an hour after it landed, revealed only faint, wispy clouds that looked nothing like rain clouds, Karkoschka said.
. . None of the images showed evidence that it had rained during the previous few years, according to an analysis to be published in the journal Icarus. And some images suggested that Titan’s lower atmosphere was full of small dust particles, which would have been cleared out by rain.

Dec 14, 08: A detailed analysis of the measurements of five different satellites has revealed the existence of warm cloak of plasma around Earth. This newfound feature is part of the magnetosphere, a shield of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surround and protect Earth from the onslaught of the solar wind.
. . The northern and southern polar lights –-aurora borealis and aurora australis-– are the only parts of the magnetosphere that are visible, but it is a critical part of Earth's space environment.
. . The warm plasma cloak is a tenuous region that starts on the night side of the planet and wraps around the dayside but then gradually fades away on the afternoon side. As a result, it only reaches about three-quarters of the way around the planet. It is fed by low-energy charged particles that are lifted into space over Earth's poles, carried behind the Earth in its magnetic tail but then jerked around 180 degrees by a kink in the magnetic fields that boosts the particles back toward Earth in a region called the plasma sheet.

Dec 10, 08: Comet orbits can be altered whenever another star comes within 10,000 AU of our sun. Such a close encounter —-occurring every 100 million years or so-— will not typically disturb planetisimals or planets, but it definitely "shakes up the whole Oort cloud", Rickman said.
. . Most scientists have presumed that these star crossings will lead to a shower of comets raining down on the Earth and the rest of the inner solar system. Some have even claimed to find evidence of periodic mass extinctions that might be explained by a single (as-yet-unidentified) star in an elliptical orbit around the sun.
. . To study the effect of stellar perturbations, Rickman and his colleagues model the Oort cloud with a sample of one million comets (the true number of cloud comets is unknown, but certainly much higher). The simulations are allowed to run for a time period corresponding to the 5-billion-year age of the solar system.
. . The results show that stars can induce comet showers, but the contrast with non-shower periods is less than what people have thought before, Rickman said. This leveling out in comet activity is due to the influence of the gravitational field of the Milky Way. The cloud experiences a tidal effect due to the fact that the gravitational field is stronger the closer one is to the plane of the galaxy.
. . The simulations by Rickman and colleagues show how the galactic tide constantly gives a small nudge to the cloud's comets. Some of these comets are in rather unstable orbits to begin with, so the slight push can send them on a sun-bound trajectory. Eventually, however, all these unstable comets are ejected from the solar system.
. . And this is where stellar encounters become important. They scramble the Oort cloud, so that the galactic tide has a new crop of unstable comets to funnel into the inner solar system. This star-tide collaboration keeps a relatively steady supply of comets zooming nearby, so the threat from comet impacts probably does not change much over time.

Dec 4, 08: New images of rock layers at Mars' surface have given scientists evidence of climate swings on ancient Mars that were driven by the wobbling of the red planet's axis —-the same mechanism that causes Earth's ice age cycles.
. . The stereo topographic maps of rock outcrops within four craters of Mars' Arabia Terra region were obtained by the high-resolution camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. At Becquerel crater, the researchers found an alternating pattern of layers within layers that suggests that each one formed over a period of about 100,000 years as a result of cyclical climate changes. These cycles are a result of the changing degree of tilt of Mars' orbital axis.
. . In addition to the apparent 100,000-year cycle of layering, every 10 layers in the craters were bundled together into larger units that correspond to a longer climate cycle of about one million years, the scientists found. In Becquerel crater, the 10-layer pattern is repeated at least 10 times.

Dec 4, 08: The possibility of life on Mars has been debated almost since the invention of the telescope. The thin atmosphere of Mars does little to block out damaging radiation from the sun, and the surface of Mars seems to be sterilized by caustic chemicals like hydrogen peroxide, but scientists still hold out hope that life on Mars could survive protected below the surface.
. . A new series of experiments suggests that indeed bacteria could survive beneath the martian soil. The team constructed a Mars Environmental Simulation Chamber (MESCH), from which air is removed with a vacuum pump, and replaced with a thin mixture of gases equivalent to those in the martian atmosphere. The chamber has a double wall cooled with liquid nitrogen to simulate the cold temperatures experienced in the martian night.
. . While exposure to 80 days in the simulated martian environment essentially sterilized the topmost two centimeters of the simulated sample core, bacteria were "relatively unaffected" in the rest of the 30 centimeter sample tubes.

Dec 3, 08: The largest sun shield ever made has been created for the Hubble Space Telescope's successor. The enormous sun blocker will unfold in space into the size of a tennis court, despite being hundreds of thousands of miles away from the help of a human hand.
. . Overall, the sun shield will keep the telescope at a cryogenic -233 C. Any warmer than that and the heat given off from the telescope would corrupt the infrared observations. "Infrared is heat radiation. In order to see the faint glow of infrared heat from distant stars and galaxies, the telescope has to be very cold.
. . The kite-shaped layers of the sun shield for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will block out the sun's ultraviolet radiation and protect the machinery from high-speed impacts of tiny space debris.
. . JWST will reside in an orbit that's 1.5 million km from Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point. (L2) The primary mirror will span 6.5 meters in diameter. Hubble's primary mirror measures 2.4 meters in diameter.
. . Complete passive cooling, in which refrigerants aren't used to keep temperatures down, is new to the field of telescopes and should keep JWST alive for its mission lifetime of no less than five and a half years, with an optimistic goal of 10 years.

Dec 2, 08: The bizarre chemical make-up of a comet suggests the blob of ice is an interloper, possibly flung into our solar system from beyond, astronomers now say, adding that the wacky comet is forcing them to create a new category for such objects. The comet, called Machholz 1, was discovered in 1986.
. . "A large fraction of comets in [the] Solar System have escaped into interstellar space, so we expect that many comets formed around other stars would also have escaped."
. . The comet contains much less of a carbon-nitrogen molecule called cyanogen, by a factor of about 72, compared with the average found in other comets. The comet also contained much less of two molecules called C2 and C3 (which have 2&3 atoms of carbon in their structures) than the average comet.
. . While no other comet has exhibited changes in chemistry due to subsequent heating by the sun, Machholz 1's orbit takes the comet to well inside Mercury's orbit every five years. The only other comet, called Yanaka, to show less cyanogen than is typical never reached such high temps.

Nov 27, 08: Scientists have dreamed of sending a surface lander or even a submarine to investigate Europa's ocean, but Dalton says the current vision for EJSM does not include any such instrument.
. . "There is a lot we can do from orbit, (work) that needs to be done before we can send the kind of lander everybody seems to want." Still, Dalton says that a lander has not been absolutely ruled out. "There are some minimal instrument concepts still on the table, but nothing like a Viking or a Phoenix (lander)", he says.
. . One such minimal instrument could be a seismometer, in order to get a sense of how much and how frequently the ice shifts on Europa. The seismometer also could include a mass spectrometer to determine what sort of chemistry takes place within the ice.
. . This mission could answer the question of whether there is life on Europa by analyzing the ice shell. The underlying ocean on Europa occasionally wells up out of cracks in the ice shell and washes over the surface, erasing features like impact craters. If life is carried in these waters, then their remains could now be frozen in the ice and an orbiter could detect them.
. . NASA and ESA are currently trying to determine what the next outer planet mission will be. Competing with EJSM is TSSM, a mission to Saturn and its large moon Titan. The final selection will be made in early 2009. Whichever mission is selected, the projected launch date is around 2020, with an arrival around 2030.

Nov 26, 08: Jupiter has a rocky core that is more than twice as large as previously thought, researchers say. They ran computer simulations to look at conditions inside Jupiter on the scale of individual hydrogen and helium atoms. Particularly, the researchers examined the properties of hydrogen-helium mixtures at the extreme pressures and temperatures that occur in Jupiter's interior.
. . With information gleaned from these simulations, the researchers developed another computer model. They found Jupiter's core is an Earth-like rock that's 14 to 18 times the mass of Earth, or about 5% of Jupiter's total mass. Previous studies suggested the core was only seven Earth masses or that Jupiter had no core at all.
. . Militzer's team found the planet's core is made up of layers of metals and rocks, along with methane ice, ammonia ice and water ice. Above this layer, they suspect an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen and helium. A metallic ball of iron and nickel, just like Earth's core, probably lies at the center of Jupiter's rocky core.

Nov 20, 08: Mars has vast glaciers hidden under aprons of rocky debris near mid-latitude mountains, a new study confirms, pointing to a new and large potential reservoir of life-supporting water on the planet. These mounds of ice exist at much lower latitudes than any ice previously found on the red planet. "Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and up to one-half-mile thick, and there are many more."
. . The team used MRO's Shallow Radar instrument to penetrate the rocky debris flows that lie in the Hellas Basin region of Mars' southern hemisphere. They examined the radar echoes to see what lay beneath the surface. All signs pointed to ice, and lots of it. A lander capable of drilling down several meters could be able to sample the ice in the glaciers.
. . The radar echoes received back by MRO indicated that radio waves passed through the overlying debris material and reflected off a deeper surface below without losing much strength — the expected signal for thick ice covered by a thin layer of debris. The radar echoes also showed no signs of significant rock debris within the glaciers, suggesting that they are relatively pure water ice.

Nov 18, 08: Strange weather on the icy dwarf planet Eris could be causing changes that scientists are now seeing at the methane-ice surface. Eris is the largest known solar-system object beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is larger than Pluto, with a diameter of ranging somewhere between about 2,400 km and 3,000 km.
. . Their results show possibly nitrogen ice mixed in with the methane ice covering Eris' surface. And the relative amount of nitrogen ice increases with depth into the ice, they found.
. . On the sunlit hemisphere or pole at perihelion, lots of sublimation would have occurred to turn nitrogen into gas. (Sublimation is the process of ice turning to gas while skipping the liquid phase.) This gas would build up in the atmosphere —-likely a very thin one around such a small object-— to increase the pressure and drive winds toward the shaded pole.
. . Nitrogen ice turns into a gas at cooler temperatures and so there would be more nitrogen gas in the atmosphere compared with methane. Then, at the shaded pole, also called the winter hemisphere, the gases would condense into snow-like or dew-like material that would fall onto Eris' surface as nitrogen ice.
. . As Eris moved closer and closer to the sun, this same process would occur for methane, with methane sublimating on the sunlit hemisphere and falling as methane ice on the shaded pole. As the winds continued to blow from the sunlit side to the shaded hemisphere (as summer progressed on the sunlit side), nitrogen would be depleted. And so relatively more methane would whoosh over to the shaded side and fall as methane ice.
. . This apparent weather could explain why the researchers found more nitrogen deeper below the surface of Eris, which would've been deposited earlier in the season.

Nov 7, 08: China aims to put an unmanned buggy on Luna by 2012, local media reported, laying the ground for its greater ambitions of putting a man on Luna.

Nov 6, 08: Volcanic activity on the far side of Luna may have lasted longer than previously thought, recent images from a Japanese lunar satellite suggest.

Nov 6, 08: The Cassini spacecraft currently traveling around the Saturn system has provided us with our best glimpse yet of Titan, but there is still much to be explored.
. . Athena Coustenis is helping draft a plan to send a hot air balloon to Titan, as well as an orbiting spacecraft and a surface probe. Called TSSM –-the Titan and Saturn System Mission-– this three-tiered approach to exploration could shed more light on the still-mysterious moon.
. . The Huygens probe descended to the surface of Titan in 2005. The photos showed a mountain with river channels carving their way down to a lake shoreline; a geography reminiscent of Earth today, except that on Titan the mountains are made of ice, and the rivers are liquid methane.
. . The Huygens probe eventually landed in a sandy river bed dotted with pebbles. This soft terrain would prove hazardous for a wheeled rover –-the Mars Rover Opportunity got stuck for weeks in a sand dune and was nearly stranded forever. "The ground on Titan may be gooey. She says that to move around, the TSSM probe could be outfitted with a helicopter rotor that would allow it to fly from place to place. The probe design also may include floaters that would prevent it from sinking if it landed on one of Titan's hydrocarbon lakes.
. . The probe also would have a scoop to help it analyze the surface soil or liquid. The models for Titan suggest the surface would be primarily made of hydrocarbon particles that rained out of the thick atmosphere.
. . "Huygens was designed as a descent module, and there were no instruments designed to do surface science after landing. We need a Titan-dedicated orbiter because after four years of Cassini, we still haven't mapped more than 25% of Titan's surface."
. . The orbiter also could be used to study Enceledus, a tiny moon that previously had not garnered much attention. NASA and ESA are working in cooperation to develop an outer planets mission, and they are expected to choose between TSSM and a mission to Jupiter and its moon Europa in early 2009. Whichever mission they choose, the projected launch date is around 2020, with an arrival around 2030.

Nov 3, 08: NASA is considering re-purposing its successful Cassini-Huygens probe to do something that it wasn't designed for, but is nonetheless amazing: searching for signs of life on Saturn's frozen moon Enceladus. Back in July 2005 Cassini observed a huge plume of ice particles and water vapor shooting from the tiny moon, suggesting the possibility that there's a liquid ocean hiding beneath its surface.
. . Now scientists are calling for the probe to be sent sailing through the plume and over the moon in detail to look for complex carbon molecules that may indicate the presence of life in the ocean using its Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer. The argument runs that abundant life living in the ocean should produce molecules like methane which could then be detected: scientists have already built a test chamber at NASA's Ames Research Center to try to simulate the conditions on Enceladus and calculate what kinds of gasses may be expected.
. . It's a long shot, but it may provide useful data before NASA sends more probes to the gas giants in the next decade.

Nov 3, 08: Like giant, cosmic chutes between the Earth and sun, magnetic portals open up every eight minutes or so to connect our planet with its host star. Once the portals open, loads of high-energy particles can travel the 93 million miles (150 million km) through the conduit during its brief opening, space scientists say. Called a flux transfer event, or FTE, such cosmic connections not only exist but are possibly twice as common as anyone ever imagined
. . Researchers have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. For instance, particles from the sun are constantly whisked away via the solar wind and often follow magnetic field lines that connect the sun's atmosphere with terra firma. The field lines allow particles to penetrate Earth's magnetosphere, the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet.
. . "We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active", Sibeck said. "We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic."
. . Several speakers at the workshop outlined the formation of a flux transfer event. One idea is that on the side of Earth facing the sun, our magnetic field presses against the sun's magnetic field. And about every eight minutes, the two fields briefly reconnect, forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.

Oct 30, 08: Meteorites that are among the oldest rocks ever found have provided new clues about the conditions that existed at the beginning of the solar system, solving a longstanding mystery and overturning some accepted ideas about the way planets form.
. . Until relatively recently, it was commonly thought that the planetesimals —-similar to the planetisimals seen in the solar system today-— that came together to build planets were "just homogenous, unmelted rocky material, with no large-scale structure", Weiss said. "Now we're realizing that many of the things that were forming planets were mini-planets themselves, with crusts and mantles and cores." And they show signs that their parent body had a magnetic field that was 20 to 40% as strong as Earth's today.

Oct 29, 08: While it seems like a geologically dead planet today, early in its history, tiny Mercury may have been a caldron of volcanic activity, NASA scientists said. MESSENGER sent back images showing extensive and deep lava flows on the surface, including hardened lava more than a mile deep filling a crater 90km in diameter.
. . The unmanned spacecraft also detected a so-called "wrinkle ridge", a long geological feature on Mercury's surface about 2,000 feet high apparently caused by long-ago contraction of the planet as it cooled. The widespread volcanism may have occurred 3.8 billion to 4 billion years ago.

Oct 28, 08: With no atmospheric barrier to shield Luna's surface, NASA is now taking steps to prevent a similar accumulation of debris in lunar orbit.

Oct 24, 08: NASA unveiled a new lunar rover which aims to transform space exploration by allowing astronauts to roam large distances without cumbersome spacesuits when they return to Luna by 2020.

Oct 23, 08: A permanently shadowed crater at Luna's south pole has long been suspected of harboring water ice deposits that might be used by future lunar colonists. No such luck, a new study suggests.

Oct 16, 08: New observations of Mars' moon Phobos show the object is more like a pile of rubble than a single solid body. Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons (Deimos is the other), is an enigmatic satellite: Scientists aren't sure how it formed, or where its material came from.
. . New data from the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft currently in orbit around the red planet are helping to shed light on the moon's origins. Scientists have created a 3-D map of Phobos from high-resolution images taken during Mars Express's summer 2008 flybys of the moon, and used this data to calculate its volume.
. . Another team of researchers used radio signals from the spacecraft that vary based on the tug of Phobo's gravity to calculate the object's precise mass, and found that it weighs 1.0721016 kg, or about 1 billionth the mass of the Earth.
. . The mass and volume information allowed researchers to reckon Phobos' density, and the scientists found that the moon is not solid, but probably filled with giant caverns. Researchers call this kind of body, which is basically a clump of rocks held together by gravity, a rubble pile. Phobos' density —-1.85 grams per cubic centimeter is lower than the density of Martian surface rocks, which are 2.7 to 3.3 grams per cc.

Oct 16, 08: Around the red planet's north pole are a feature called the north polar layered deposits, which are a series of ice-rich layers deposited over time and up to several kilometers thick.

Oct 13, 08: Scientists have discovered a giant cyclone swirling on Saturn's north pole, and observed a similar storm on the planet's south pole in detail 10 times greater than before, thanks to new images from Cassini spacecraft. The new images, taken in infrared light, reveal for the first time a massive cyclone churning at the north pole, similar to a gigantic storm on Saturn's south pole.
. . Unlike Earth's hurricanes, which stem from the ocean's heat and water, Saturn's cyclones have no body of water at their bases. The storms on that planet are locked to Saturn's poles, whereas terrestrial hurricanes drift across the ocean.

Oct 8, 08: A small planetisimal exploded over Africa this week following what astronomers said was the first firm prediction of an incoming space rock. It did not strike Earth.
. . The rock was about the size of kitchen table, astronomers estimated, and they think the explosion (caused by the pressures of slamming into the atmosphere) left nothing but perhaps a few small bits to fall to the surface. It exploded with an energy of somewhere between 1.1 and 2.1 kilotons of TNT. Such events occur a few times every year, but never before had one been predicted.

Oct 4, 08: A "space elevator": some experts now believe the concept is well within the bounds of possibility --maybe even within our lifetimes.
. . A conference discussing developments in space elevator concepts is being held in Japan in November, and hundreds of engineers and scientists from Asia, Europe and the Americas are working to design the only lift that will take you directly to the one hundred-thousandth floor.
. . Engineers hope the elevator will transport people and objects into space, and there have even been suggestions that it could be used to dispose of nuclear waste. Another proposed idea is to use the elevator to place solar panels in space to provide power for homes on Earth.
. . Scientists at the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA) are working seriously on the space-elevator project. In total, it's believed over 300 scientists and engineers are engaged in such work around the globe. NASA is also holding a $4 million Space Elevator Challenge to encourage designs for a space elevator than can work.
. . Tsuchida said the technology driving the race to build the first space elevator is the quickly developing material carbon nanotube. It is lightweight and has a tensile strength 180 times stronger than steel cable. Currently, it is the only material with the potential to be strong enough.
. . While JSEA has set a time frame of the 2030s to get a space elevator under construction --and developments are moving quickly-- Hoffman acknowledges it could be a little further away than that.

Oct 2, 08: A team of astronomers announced the discovery of two moons around an intriguing "asteroid". The main-belt asteroid 216 Kleopatra has two companions.
. . The asteroid was made of two components. Kleopatra has been called the "dog-bone" asteroid. Its weird shape is probably the outcome of an impact event. The two lobes could be fragments resulting from the disruption of a parent asteroid that later gently collided to form a dumbbell-shaped body with overall dimension of 217 km by 94 km by 81 km.
. . A tiny 5 km-sized moon was seen on the first images of Kleopatra. Additional data taken during this eventful night revealed a second fainter satellite (3 km-sized) that was closer to the primary.
. . They took advantage of the asteroid's position when it was close to Earth at 1.2 AU. They used the Keck-II telescope, the largest optical telescope in the world located on the top of Mauna Kea, in Hawaii. The Keck Adaptive Optics system was recently improved and its large 10-m aperture produces images with an incomparable quality in sharpness.

Sept 29, 08: Even as its mission winds down, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has spotted snow falling from the Martian sky. Phoenix's camera and meteorological equipment have shown clouds and fog forming during the night as the air gets colder. "This is now occurring every night."
. . A laser instrument that is pointed directly up into Mars' atmosphere has also detected snow from clouds about 4 km above the spacecraft's landing site. Data show the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground. There are no conventional photographs of the snowfall.
. . Based on models of Phoenix's energy decline, mission engineers don't expect Phoenix to last much past late November. Eventually, the sun will set on Phoenix completely, and CO2 ice will likely deposit on it. That combined with the ever-decreasing temperatures of winter will likely destroy the spacecrafts components. "Nobody anticipates that the vehicle will survive that harsh winter."

Sept 23, 08: Phoenix Mars Lander is going to try something new —-pushing aside a Martian rock and peeking at what's underneath.

Sept 22, 08: The aging but intrepid Mars rover Opportunity is set to embark on a two-year mission it may never complete --a 12-km journey to a crater far bigger than one it has called home for two years.

Sept 22, 08: Saturn's rings may be more massive and older than previously thought, researchers said. Because the rings appear so clean and bright, some scientists had argued the they were much younger than Saturn, possible as little as 100 million years. But closer examination shows the rings are rougher than they look. There's the possibility that the rings were formed billions of years ago.

Sept 19, 08: The International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced the name of a new dwarf planet to join the existing four in the solar system. The object previously known as 2003 EL61 is now named Haumea, after the goddess of childbirth and fertility in Hawaiian mythology. It's composed almost entirely of rock with a pure ice crust.
. . The new dwarf planet has the same diameter as Pluto, but is much thinner, and contains about 32% of Pluto's mass. Scientists suggest Haumea's oblate shape arose from its rapid spin —-it rotates about once every four hours. Haumea is currently about 50 times as far from the sun as Earth is, but its orbit can swing it in as close as 35 times
. . Two small companion objects, thought to have been knocked off Haumea's body by past impacts, keep the dwarf planet company. The two moons were also re-designated with new names: Hi'iaka and Namaka, after the two children born to the goddess Haumea.

Sept 18, 08: British scientists and engineers are working on a potential new European mission to bring back material from an asteroid.

Sept 17, 08: Parts of ancient Mars may have been wet for a billion years longer than scientists previously thought, a new study of images of the red planet's surface suggests.

Sept 12, 08: Dust devils raging across the arctic plains of Mars were caught on film by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander.

Sept 9, 08: A tiny, six-legged critter that can suspend all biological activity in extreme environments survived a journey to space that would have instantly killed any human and most other life forms. In the first test of its kind, researchers exposed the hardy segmented creatures, called "water bears", to the open and harsh vacuum of space, with all its deadly radiation, on a spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Many of them survived.

Aug 25, 08: Some of the gullies that cut the sides of Martian craters were likely formed by meltwater from glaciers that existed a few million years ago, when Mars was wetter than it is now, a new study suggests.

Aug 25, 08: By searching through a survey region known as Stripe 82, a team led by Dr Andrew Becker of the U of Washington, has discovered almost 50 new planetisimal-sized bodies in the outer regions of our Solar System.
. . While most of the newly discovered objects are normal members of the Kuiper belt, a large band of icy bodies stretching beyond the orbit of Neptune, there were also surprises. The team discovered two Neptunian Trojans, planetisimals which share the same orbit as the outermost giant planet.
. . The new object is only 50-90km across, and not a normal planetisimal: "It's probably a mixture of ice and rock, rather like a comet although it never comes close enough to the Sun to develop a tail", said Dr Becker.
. . The new object's orbit is also unusual; only one other object - Sedna, discovered in 2003 - might come from the same region of the Solar System. Sedna and 2006 SQ372 might represent the first two known objects to have come from the inner edge of the Oort cloud, a vast reservoir of cometary material believed to exist right on the edge of the Solar System.

Aug 20, 08: Clouds of water ice drifting above the Martian surface eat up some of the ozone in Mars' atmosphere, a new study suggests, giving scientists new clues about the chemical environment and climate.

Aug 16, 08: The Cassini probe has pinpointed exact locations where icy jets erupt from Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. New carefully targeted pictures reveal details of the prominent south polar "tiger stripe" fractures from which the jets emerge. The images show the fractures are about 980 feet (300 meters) deep, with V-shaped inner walls. The outer flanks of some of the fractures show extensive deposits of fine material. Finely fractured terrain littered with blocks of ice the size of small houses surround the fractures. "Over geologic time, the eruptions have clearly moved up and down the lengths of the tiger stripes."

Aug 14, 08: For almost thirty years, scientists have known that complex carbon compounds called tholins exist on comets and in the atmospheres of the outer planets. Theoretically, tholins might interact with water in a process called hydrolysis to produce complex molecules similar to those found on the early Earth. On the Earth, complex organic molecules are believed to have been an early step in the emergence of life; such compounds are called prebiotic.
. . Titan, the sixth and largest moon of the planet Saturn, is thought to be made largely of ice. Some of that ice may melt during meteor impacts or in underground processes, producing "ice volcanoes" that emit a "lava" containing ammonia mixed with water. Over a period of days, compounds similar to tholins can be hydrolyzed (which means to react with water) at near-freezing temperatures. Liquid water exposed on Titan is believed to persist for hundreds to thousands of years —-plenty of time for such reactions to take place.
. . Tantalizingly, it has been suggested that a similar process may have happened on the early Earth. Neish found that up to 10% of the organic compounds she began with reacted with oxygen from the water to form complex organic molecules.

Aug 14, 08: Meteorites that fall to Earth usually come directly from the planetisimal belt between Mars and Jupiter, rather than from the population of larger space rocks that drifted in from the planetisimal belt's innermost edge to hang around our planet's neighborhood.
. . The finding explains why the makeup of most meteorites doesn't match the composition of most near-Earth planetisimals (NEAs). Two thirds of NEAs matched up with LL chondrite rocks, which are low in metals, but just 8% of meteorites had a similar match. The meteorites lined up more with the mixed rock population of the planetisimal belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter.
. . Small, boulder-like rocks from the planetisimal belt end up as meteorites striking Earth at least in part because of uneven heating from the sun. Solar energy heats the day side of a rotating rock, which then radiates the heat away and creates a propelling force that can change the rock's path. However, the Yarkovsky effect acts more weakly on larger planetisimals, so that it only gradually nudges the bigger brutes toward Earth's vicinity.

Aug 14, 08: NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander has sent back the first-ever image of a speck of red Martian dust taken through an atomic force microscope, shown at a higher magnification than anything ever seen from another planet.
. . The dust particle is about one micrometer --or one millionth of a meter-- across and is representative of the dust that cloaks Mars, producing the planet's distinctive red soil and coloring its sky pink.
. . The atomic force microscope maps the particles in three dimensions and can detail shapes as small as 1/1000th the width of a human hair --or 100 times greater magnification than the lander's optical microscope.

Aug 8, 08: The Solar System emerged in surprisingly good order from the violence of planetary creation, according to a new simulation. Researchers found that planetary formation in the first few million years often resembles a violent wrestling match among hungry siblings, with planets fighting to feed on gas and dust while pulling at each other with gravitational arms. "There's massive bodies competing with each other and flinging each other around", said Edward Thommes, a physicist at the U of Guelph in Ontario.
. . The simulation traces the creation of a planetary system from almost beginning to end, for the first time, and suggests that the Solar System started with just the right mass to become a relatively orderly place in the universe.
. . Too much starting mass in the disk results in a swarm of gas giants crowding into the central star. However, too little mass produces nothing bigger than Neptune-like ice giants. The tussle among gas giants can typically lead to loopy elliptical orbits. Sometimes a gas giant even acts as a slingshot to throw a sibling into deep space.

Aug 4, 08: NASA scientists said the surprise discovery of a sometimes toxic chemical on the surface of Mars does not diminish the possibility of finding microbial life on the Red Planet. The chemical NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander found in a sample of Martian dirt may not be harmful to any potential life there and could in fact be a boon to it, mission scientists said.
. . Though oxidizers can be harmful to life, this isn't the case for perchlorate, scientists said. "It does not preclude life on Mars. In fact it is a potential energy source."
. . On Earth, perchlorates are found in Chile's highly arid Atacama Desert, which is often used as an analog to the Martian surface. Scientists had originally thought no life could survive in the Atacama, but later research found organics in nitrate deposits associated with perchlorates.

July 30, 08: A giant, glassy lake larger than North America's Lake Ontario graces the south pole of Saturn's largest moon Titan, new research confirms.

July 21, 08: Scientists have calculated how many nanotubes it would take to support the weight of one human. The discovery unto itself isn't that impressive -—a nanotube rope that's one centimeter in diameter could do the trick. But when you realize that the rope is absurdly lightweight and invisible, the prospect gets a lot more exciting.
. . Nanotubes separated by more than one wavelength (five micrometers) are invisible. And the one centimeter human-supporting rope mentioned above takes the five-micrometer principle into account. Imagine scaling such an idea to create a series of invisible ropes in architecture, a sort of flying buttress that you can't see.
. . But what's possibly even more amazing—that human-supporting rope weighs just 10 milligrams per kilometer. If the distance from the ground into space is 80km, that means that an 800 milligram rope could lift humans into space. 800 milligrams is less than the weight of three aspirin tablets.

July 16, 08: Telescope mirrors made from lunar dust could help realize dreams of stargazing from the far side of Luna. Creating gigantic lunar telescopes would normally carry an astronomical price tag, but NASA researchers used a mix of epoxy, simulated lunar dust and carbon nanotubes to demonstrate how to use materials already found on Luna.
. . Making a Hubble-sized mirror would require bringing 60 kg of epoxy to Luna with 1.3 kg of carbon nanotubes and less than 1 gram of aluminum, according to Chen's calculations. Meanwhile, 600 kg of lunar dust could provide the bulk of the material. Luna's lack of atmosphere also suits the vacuum conditions needed to make the mirror.
. . Astronomers may imagine telescope mirrors half the size of a football field, but realizing such dreams depends heavily on whenever NASA returns human explorers to Luna and sets up a moon base.
. . Chen and his colleagues will try to scale up their demonstration by creating 0.5 meter and 1 meter mirrors using the simulated lunar dust. They also plan to figure out ways to hone the quality of the finished mirror's surface, and are already speculating about ways future explorers and robots could build even larger telescope mirrors on Luna —-perhaps within an impact crater. "It's totally out-of-the-box, but it's fun to think about."

July 16, 08: A team of scientists shows that Martian ice is left over from warmer, wetter times. "The minerals present in Mars' ancient crust show a variety of wet environments."
. . His team used the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) and other instruments on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to look at colors in reflected sunlight. This helps determine what minerals are there. "Water must have been creating minerals at depth to get the signatures we see." The clay minerals would have to have been formed at low temperatures, the researchers said.
. . "What does this mean for habitability? It's very strong", Mustard said. "It wasn't this hot, boiling cauldron. It was a benign, water-rich environment for a long period of time." The clay-like minerals, called phyllosilicates, suggest water interacted with rocks dating back to what is called the Noachian period on Mars, about 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago. "In most locations, the rocks are lightly altered by liquid water, but in a few locations they have been so altered that a great deal of water must have flushed though the rocks and soil."

July 11, 08: Nothing is out of whack with the sun, a NASA researcher said this week, despite some scientists' suggestions that a lull in the weather there lately is unusually long, a phenomenon linked to at least one small ice age.

July 8, 08: Planetisimals often come in pairs, with the two objects spinning around each other. Binary planetisimal systems are surprisingly common —-they seem to make up about 15 percent of near-Earth planetisimals. Now scientists say sunlight could be the cause of these binary boulders. A new study suggests energy from the sun can spin up a single planetisimal until it ejects material that becomes a separate satellite.
. . Astronomers first discovered these strange planetisimal pairs 15 years ago, and have been puzzled about what causes them. Now scientists have created a computer model that matches what they see. When sunlight hits one of these piles, the material absorbs some of the radiation and then re-emits it at a slightly different angle, giving itself a small push in angular momentum. This change can cause the planetisimal to spin up slightly in what's called the YORP effect.
. . Eventually, if the rock spins fast enough, the force outward from the rotation will overpower the gravitational pull inward and material will eject along the equator to form a new small satellite. The two planetisimals then circle each other in binary pairs.

July 8, 08: Water has been found conclusively for the first time inside ancient moon samples brought back by Apollo astronauts. The discovery may force scientists to rethink the lunar past and future, although uncertainty remains about how much water exists and whether future explorers could extract it. The water was found inside volcanic glass beads, which represent solidified magma from the early moon's interior.
. . Scientists have long assumed the moon was dry because of its violent birth roughly 4.5 billion years ago. The leading theory holds that a Mars-sized planet smashed into Earth and tore off molten pieces that eventually formed into the moon. Most scientists thought that any water in the developing lunar body would have vaporized and been lost to space. The researchers also ruled out the chance that such beads could have become contaminated by outside forces such as hydrogen —-an element of water-— from the solar wind. "We developed a way to detect as little as 5 ppm of water." The group found up to 46 ppm of water within the glass beads.
. . The glass beads may contain 745 ppm of water —-strikingly similar to solidified lava that came up from the Earth's upper mantle through undersea vents. However, Saal's group gives 260 ppm of water as the most certain figure for now.

July 6, 08: Saturn's rings and moons turned out wilder than any scientist could have imagined, but unknowns remain as the Cassini spacecraft concludes its primary mission and embarks on a new one. An extended, two-year Cassini tour began June 30.
. . Findings from the four-year primary mission include liquid lakes on Saturn's moon Titan, icy plumes spouting from the moon Enceladus, and gigantic storms that make Saturn seem like Jupiter. A monster storm produced lightning 10,000 times more powerful than any seen on Earth, spanning thousands of miles. Saturn now harbors more than 60 larger moons, compared with just 18 known moons when Cassini launched in 1997.

July 5, 08: Data from a flyby of Mercury in January 2008 show the planet has contracted by more than 1.5km in diameter over its history. Scientists believe the shrinkage is due to the planet's core slowly cooling.

July 3, 08: A NASA spacecraft's first flyby of Mercury has yielded a wealth of information about the inner-most planet, some of which confirms volcanism occurred there, settling a longstanding debate. The volcano is about 95 km in diameter, bigger than the state of Delaware. MESSENGER also confirmed that the surface of Mercury is very low in iron, though the planet's high density implies that its core is very iron-rich.
. . Mercury's magnetic field is much weaker than the one that surrounds our planet. Because the field is weak and Mercury is so close to the sun, the solar wind pushes the planet's magnetosphere very close to its surface on the side facing the sun, while on the side opposite the sun, the magnetosphere is very elongated. In fact, "the solar wind gets very close to Mercury's surface some of the time", occasionally even hitting the surface.
. . When the solar wind hits Mercury's surface, it sputters particles off into the magnetosphere. MESSENGER detected these ionized atoms as it sailed through the magnetosphere; it found silicon, sodium, sulfur and even water ions surrounding the planet.

July 3, 08: Edward Montgomery's team and a team from Ames Research Center hope to deploy a solar sail called NanoSail-D this summer.
. . A SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket will carry it into space from Omelek Island in the Pacific Ocean between July 29th to August 6th. "NanoSail-D will be the first fully deployed solar sail in space, and the first spacecraft to use solar pressure as a primary means of attitude control or orbital maneuvering."
. . An earlier effort mounted by the Planetary Society, Cosmos I, failed three years ago. Science fiction fans have been looking forward to this for generations.

July 3, 08: The planetisimals that pepper our solar system come in all shapes, sizes and ages. What causes such a variety among space rocks has been something of a mystery, until now. Researchers have been using a vast database to study a staggering 11,735 planetisimals. They have discovered that planetisimals change shape over time. Because they are small their surface gravity is low. This means that many have strange, irregular shapes."
. . Scientists like Gyula think that about one third of known planetisimals belong to groups called "families." These clusters probably formed from piles of debris after larger objects collided.
. . Observing planetisimals as they spin in space and then studying the amount of light reflected, scientists can get an idea of their shape. Getting accurate results from this method can take a long time. It seems to take one billion to two billion years for irregular planetisimals to be transformed into smooth balls.
. . But what changes the planetisimals' shape? Gyula and his team have shown that planetisimals change shape from elongated to roughly spherical due to being impacted during their lifetimes. They are like pebbles on the beach that become worn smooth over many years --only in space, erosion is caused by small impacts as rocks knock into each other and chip pieces off.
. . Learning all we can about planetisimals could help us avoid disaster if we ever detect a large, fast-moving one on a collision course with the Earth.

Jun 26, 08: "Flabbergasted" NASA scientists said that Martian soil appeared to contain the requirements to support life, although more work would be needed to prove it.
. . Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected. Phoenix so far has not detected organic carbon considered an essential building block of life.

Jun 26, 08: Some scientists believe that at least one meteorite found in Antarctica preserves evidence of ancient life on Mars. Now, work by a team of English scientists reinforces an earlier suggestion that evidence of life on the early Earth might be found in meteorites on Luna.
. . Given that material from early Mars has been found in meteorites on Earth, it certainly seems reasonable that material from the early Earth could be found on Luna. Indeed, Armstrong's paper estimated that tens of thousands of tons of terrestrial meteorites may have arrived there during the Late Heavy Bombardment.
. . At impact velocities of 2.5 kilometers per second or less, "no part of the projectile even approached a peak pressure at which melting would be expected." He concludes that biomarkers ranging from the presence of organic carbon to "actual microfossils" could have survived the relatively low pressures experienced by the trailing edge of a large meteorite impacting Luna.

Jun 25, 08: Why is Mars two-faced? Scientists say fresh evidence supports the theory that a monster impact punched the red planet, leaving behind perhaps the largest gash on any heavenly body in the solar system.
. . Today, the Martian surface has a split personality. The southern hemisphere of Mars is pockmarked and filled with ancient rugged highlands. By contrast, the northern hemisphere is smoother and covered by low-lying plains.
. . According to the researchers, a planetisimal or comet whacked a young Mars some 4 billion years ago, blasting away much of its northern crust and creating a giant hole over 40% of the surface. New calculations reveal the crater known as the Borealis basin measures 5,300 miles across and 6,600 miles long —-the size of Asia, Europe and Australia combined. The northern lowlands were on average 2 miles lower than the southern highlands and had a thinner crust.
. . A 1,000-mile-wide object traveling at more than 13,000 miles per hour —-or 24 times faster than a jetliner-— would hit Mars at an angle between 30 and 60 degrees. The collision would be equal to an explosion of 75 trillion to 150 trillion megatons of TNT. It would have occurred more than 3.9 billion years ago, the researchers said, around the time an even larger planetisimal is thought to have struck Earth, forming our planet's moon.
. . This group simulated the behavior of the Martian crust during an impact and found that not only could an impact such as the one proposed cause the differences seen in Mars' two halves, it could also explain other features seen on the red planet, such as magnetic field anomalies found in the Southern hemisphere.

Jun 25, 08: Liquid water on Mars may have once drizzled from the sky or collected as dew on the ground. The falling water left signs in the Martian soil measured by NASA's Viking, Pathfinder, and rover missions, a new study suggests. Water falling from the Martian sky is something that's never before been proven.

Jun 24, 08: Scientists chose to dig in Mars' far north this time because they think it's an analog to Earth's polar regions, which preserve life's building blocks and sometimes even life itself in ice. Researchers have shown microbes on Earth can be inactive in a deep freeze for thousands of years and resuscitated under the right conditions.
. . In 2005, NASA researchers announced they revived bacteria that were apparently dormant for 32,000 years in a frozen pond in central Alaska. Earlier this month, Penn State U scientists said they were able to grow in the lab an ultra-small species of bacteria trapped in a Greenland glacier under high pressure and low oxygen for at least 120,000 years.

Jun 20, 08: Digging earlier today, the Phoenix knocked loose a few white particles that have since disappeared. So, sublimation has occurred, & there is Martian ice.

Jun 19, 08: A change for the ocean suspected under the icy shell of Enceladus. Recent research has shown that this small moon of Saturn does not produce enough heat in its present configuration to keep water from freezing down to its core.

Jun 13, 08: Some of the building blocks of life on Earth came from space, according to a new study of molecules in meteorite fragments. The study confirmed for the first time that some of the raw material for DNA and RNA found in a meteorite did not contaminate the rock after it landed on Earth, but rather originated in space.
. . The materials in question are the molecules uracil and xanthine, which are precursors to the molecules that make up DNA and RNA, and are known as nucleobases. The scientists analyzed the genetic building blocks and found that they contain a heavy form of carbon which could only have been formed in space.
. . Many space rocks similar to the Murchison meteorite rained down on Earth between 3.8 and 4.5 billion years ago, when primitive life was forming. The heavy bombardment would have dropped large amounts of meteorite material to the surface on planets such as Earth and Mars. "Because meteorites represent left over materials from the formation of the solar system, the key components for life --including nucleobases-- could be widespread in the cosmos."
. . As more and more of life's raw materials are discovered in objects from space, the possibility of life springing forth wherever the right chemistry is present becomes more likely."

Jun 5, 08: Recent headlines have announced a raging controversy among scientists about whether there is actually water ice in the permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. Because these permanently shadowed regions are extremely cold (~100K) water ice is expected to be stable there ? even in the vacuum of space. If water is present, it will dramatically reduce the cost of a lunar base. The Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission is intended to test for this water by impacting the lunar surface with its empty rocket upper stage, and looking for water in the ejected plume.

Jun 5, 08: A team of astronomers has cooked up an out-of-this-world recipe for lunar concrete that could be used to build homes on Luna. The innovative recipe is of carbon, glue and moon dust. "We could make huge telescopes on Luna relatively easily, and avoid the large expense of transporting a large mirror from Earth", said Peter Chen of NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center.
. . To arrive at the concrete recipe, Chen and his Goddard colleagues including Douglas Rabin, mixed small amounts of carbon nanotubes and epoxies (glue-like materials) with simulated lunar dust, or crushed rock that has the same composition and grain size as dust on Luna.
. . After several iterations, one of which yielded what Chen described as "gooey and smelly," the team created a strong material with the consistency of concrete. Next, they coated the material with epoxy and spun the wet lunar concrete to form a 30cm-wide bowl-like structure shaped like a telescope mirror. "After that, all we needed to do was coat the mirror blank with a small amount of aluminum, and voila."
. . Chen and Rabin envision creating a telescope mirror spanning 50 meters in diameter on Luna. Such an observatory would dwarf the largest optical telescope in the world — the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias, also called the Great Telescope Canary Islands.
. . A monster telescope or two such telescopes working in concert on Luna could help in the search for extrasolar planets and make detailed observations of distant galaxies, Chen said.

May 30, 08: The fastest spinning natural object in the Solar System has been discovered by a British amateur astronomer. The compact stony asteroid 2008 HJ --completes a full rotation once every 42.7 seconds, according to its discoverer, Richard Miles. 2008 HJ is estimated to be some 12m by 24m in size --smaller than a tennis court. Yet it probably has a mass in excess of 5,000 tons.

May 29, 08: As the Mars Phoenix Lander readies its robotic arm to touch Martian water for the first time, a separate group of scientists have some bad news for those hoping to find microbial extraterrestrials on the planet: the water that previously existed on the surface of the planet was probably too salty and too acidic to support the development of life.
. . That's the word from a new geochemical analysis of rocks encountered by the Mars Rovers reported in the journal Science this week. The researchers calculated that the Martian ocean believed to have covered parts of Mars 3.5 to 4 billion years ago would have been saltier than the Great Salt Lake and nearly as salty as the Dead Sea, rendering it nearly inhospitable to life.
. . The presence of an iron sulfate mineral known as jarosite, which only forms in acid water, also allows the scientists to tack high acidity to the high salinity they'd already calculated.
. . It's possible that the water the Phoenix will encounter won't have an ancient origin at all. "There are hypotheses circulating that the ice is recent and derived from the atmosphere," said Tosca. Still, based on their evidence, Tosca believes that even when there was surface water, it is improbable that life ever got a tentacle-hold on Mars.

May 29, 08: Tiny freshwater organisms that have amazed scientists because of their sex-free lifestyle may have survived so well because they steal genes from other creatures, scientists reported. They found genes from bacteria, fungi and even plants incorporated into the DNA of bdelloid rotifers --minuscule animals that appear to have given up sex 40 million years ago.
. . "Bdelloid rotifers are small freshwater invertebrates that apparently lack sexual reproduction and can withstand desiccation at any life stage."

May 29, 08: A European spacecraft caught sounds from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander during its screaming Sunday descent to the red planet's arctic surface. The sounds come through loud and clear after processing by the Mars Express Flight Control Team.
. . Phoenix is equipped with a microphone that was originally slated to record sounds during landing in conjunction with a camera designed to take aerial photographs of the probe's arctic landing site. While that plan was scrapped to avoid complications with Phoenix's landing, the microphone may still be used on the surface.

May 24, 08: Navigating by x-rays from pulsars could be the GPS of the solar system.

May 23, 08: Jupiter has a new freckle --a third red spot much smaller than the well-known Great Red Spot and a newer one dubbed Red Spot Jr., scientists said.
. . A megaflood seems to have scoured a canyon on Earth which, interestingly, looks a lot like canyons on Mars. And that new conclusion, researchers say, could help figure out whether there was ever life on Mars.
. . Scientists have found signs that water may once have gurgled up through the Martian soil in hydrothermal vents similar to those in Yellowstone National Park.

May 22, 08: Over the past two and a half years, NASA astronomers have observed Luna flashing at them not just once but one hundred times.
. . "They're explosions caused by meteoroids hitting Luna", explains Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "A typical blast is about as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT and can be photographed easily using a backyard telescope." On Earth, Quadrantids disintegrate as flashes of light in the atmosphere; on the airless Moon they hit the ground and explode.

May 16, 08: The meandering poles of Jupiter's moon Europa etched tell-tale scars across the satellite's icy surface, a new study finds. Europa's ice-heavy poles shifted almost 90 degrees, from near the current equator to their current north-south alignment, which caused the moon's spin axis to change as well. Europa joins Earth, Mars, and Saturn's icy moon Enceladus as planetary bodies that have experienced "true polar wander" where their spin axis shifted, Matsuyama said.
. . "A spinning body is most stable with its mass farthest from its spin axis", said Isamu Matsuyama, planetary scientist. "On Europa, variations in the thickness of its outer shell caused a mass imbalance, so the rotation axis reoriented to a new stable state." Stresses from the changing spin axis caused fractures that stretch more than a third of the way across Europa's surface.
. . The new finding adds more weight to the notion that Europa's icy crust slides over a liquid, subsurface ocean which could harbor conditions for life. A similar possibility exists on Saturn's moon Titan, leading NASA and Europe to consider future deep space missions to one or both places. "The large reorientation on Europa required to explain the circular depressions implies that its outer ice shell is decoupled from the core by a liquid layer."

May 15, 08: Peering beneath the ice at the north pole of Mars has now revealed the red planet may be surprisingly colder than was thought. Any liquid water that might exist on Mars therefore might be hidden deeper than once suspected. The ice cap there goes about 2 km deep and is roughly the size of Pakistan at 800,000 square km.
. . These scans revealed the polar cap has up to four layers of ice rich in sand and dust, each separated by clearer sheets of nearly pure ice. Each dirty and clean layer is some 300 meters thick.

May 6, 08: A space-based radar aboard a European Mars probe could help peer beneath the surface of Earth's ice sheets, not to mention the frozen extraterrestrial seas of moons like Europa and Titan. The Mars dry run has inspired the early development of the Advanced Concept for Radar Sounder (ACRAS) that will set its initial sights on Earth's Antarctic ice sheets. It can penetrate up to 3-4 kilometers within the ice.

May 5, 08: Jupiter has a thin set of nearly imperceptible rings with features that have long puzzled scientists. A new study reveals how light and shadow are at work there, solving several mysteries at once.
. . Nowhere near as visible as the rings of Saturn, which are icy and bright and contain many chunks as big as houses, Jupiter's rings are made mostly of dark dust, kicked up by meteoroids slamming into Jupiter's inner moons.
. . Alternating light and shadow cause these anomalies, the new research finds. "As they orbit about the planet, dust grains in the rings alternately discharge and charge when they pass through the planet's shadow", explained astronomer Douglas Hamilton of the U of Maryland. "These systematic variations in dust particle electric charges interact with the planet's powerful magnetic field. Small dust particles are pushed beyond the ring's expected outer boundary, and very small grains "even change their inclination, or orbital orientation, to the planet."
. . The new understanding can be applied to the rings of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, too, but the effects are more pronounced around Jupiter. "The icy particles in Saturn's famous rings are too large and heavy to be significantly shaped by this process, which is why similar anomalies are not seen there."

Apr 24, 08: There's a growing buzz in the astrobiology community that ancient hydrothermal springs may have been spotted on Mars. The high-powered zoom lens of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has picked up the features --two possible ancient hydrothermal springs are viewed as light-toned, elliptical structures. The martian features have a striking similarity to spring mounds here on Earth.

Apr 23, 08: An electrically-charged solar sail with a possible "turbo" option may be ready for its first space trials in three years if scientists in Finland have their way. The Finnish invention would use long, positively-charged tethers to ride the solar wind, without the need for any sort of fuel or propellant.
. . "A flight out of the Solar System to measure the gas, dust, plasma and magnetic field in the undisturbed interstellar space would perhaps be the 'flagship' thing to do."
. . The solar sail's debut would involve a smaller model with 8-km long tethers riding in a high elliptical Earth orbit. That would allow Janhunen and others to gauge the force of the solar wind on the spacecraft with an accelerometer. Two solar panels would power an electron gun that keeps the spacecraft tethers charged, creating propulsion from the similarly charged solar wind pushing against the sail. Researchers are looking into aluminum or copper alloy wires for the tethers.
. . The maiden mission would also test a concept to increase the thrust from the solar wind, called radio frequency electron heating. "turbo" charge. Radio-frequency waves could excite the solar wind particles through electron heating, which might boost the thrust created. The concept is difficult to simulate or analyze in theory, but should be easy to test in space, according to Janhunen.
. . A successful solar sail could have big payoffs by making deep space missions cheaper without fuel requirements. A fleet of solar sail spacecraft could also significantly lower the cost of transporting material within the solar system, such as bringing water ice from planetisimals to produce rocket propellant in Earth orbit.
. . "Starting the long-awaited planetisimal resource utilization could be significant for the longer-term well-being and survival of our civilization on this planet", Janhunen said.

Apr 16, 08: Scientists with the European Space Agency (Esa) say the day when flowers bloom on Luna has come closer. An Esa-linked team has shown that marigolds can grow in crushed rock very like the lunar surface, with no need for plant food.
. . Some see growing plants on Luna as a step towards human habitation. "We would bring a system of water circulation and recovery, which is also the type of system that in any case you want to develop when you are going to manufacture a primitive sort of life support system."
. . The new step, taken in the experiments reported at the EGU, is to remove the need for bringing nutrients and soil from Earth. In neat anorthosite, the plants fared very badly. But adding different types of bacteria made them thrive; the bacteria appeared to draw elements from the rock that the plants needed, such as potassium.
. . As director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG), which looks for exciting and innovative ways to study our nearest cosmic neighbor, Bernard Foing believes that Europe or one of the other players will eventually decide to plant the seeds of Earth where previously humanity has merely planted flags. "We are considering whether we could do this on some precursor robotic mission, even before we consider putting people on Luna", he said.

Apr 16, 08: The ion engine developed by Qinetiq, the T5, will be flown for the first time on the European Space Agency's Goce spacecraft. The mission will fly just 200-300km above the Earth, mapping the tiny variations in its gravity field.
. . The UK-built engine ejects xenon ions at velocities exceeding 40,000m/s; Goce's mission will end when the 40kg fuel tank empties. A replica of the T5 engine sits in the test facility at Qinetiq. It is tiny --weighing 3kg, and looks rather like the oil filter of a car. Yet despite this humble appearance, it took 20 to 30 years to develop, at a cost of tens of millions of pounds.
. . In space, ion engines will draw electric power from solar panels, generating a thrust equivalent to the weight of a postcard. Goce is staying very close to Earth, flying in an ultra-low orbit, where it will encounter wisps of air. The benefit of an ion engine on this mission is to provide drag compensation, or cruise control.
. . Future Esa missions such as BepiColombo, bound for the innermost planet, Mercury, will also use the technology. Also, Smart-1, the European mission to Luna; and Nasa's Deep Space 1, which flew by a comet.

Apr 16, 08: A telescope on the far side of Luna could probe the "dark ages" of the universe while blocking out the radio-wavelength noise of Earth civilizations. Up to one hundred thousand antennas would form the Dark Ages Lunar Interferometer (DALI), the largest telescope ever built, and allow astronomers to hear faint whispering signals from a time when no stars even existed.
. . "This will look at one of the most fundamental questions ever conceived, back when the universe was made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium —-no stars, no galaxies." The so-called dark ages of astronomy describe a half-billion year period following the Big Bang when clouds of ionized gas cooled as the universe expanded. The only faint noise came from hydrogen atoms doing spin-flips, which gives off radio-wavelength signals that astronomers can pick up on. Scientists currently estimate that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old.

Apr 15, 08: It is well-known that deep-space radiation would be risky for future astronauts on long-lasting missions to targets such as Mars, but new research puts the danger in stark relief.
. . The health risks could include cancer, especially colon cancer, and premature aging, according to preliminary findings from a NASA-funded study of mice which found that so-called high linear-energy-transfer (LET) radiation in space can do more harm to living cells than the low-LET radiation that people encounter more commonly on Earth, said researcher Dr. Albert Fornace.
. . The study found that high-energy radiation caused more damage in the gastrointestinal tract of mice than lower-energy gamma or X-ray radiation used in medical therapies. That's because unusually high levels of free radical molecules can injure living cells and lead to runaway genetic mutations which trigger cancer. Researchers also saw evidence of premature aging in the graying coats of the mice, with similar results having surfaced before in other radiation studies.

Apr 15, 08: The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft's mission at Saturn has been extended by two years, NASA announced today.

Apr 8, 08: Astronomers have finally tracked down the missing starting point of one of the two types of solar wind. The parts of the solar wind that emanate from the sun's equatorial region originate at the edges of bright regions in the sun's atmosphere and are released when the magnetic fields of two bright regions link up, scientists announced. The wind's particles are accelerated by the sun's magnetic fields, and the configuration of the magnetic fields can influence how fast the solar wind is going when it rushes out into space.
. . Astronomers recognize two types of solar wind, distinguished by their speed. The fast one is known to originate from coronal hole regions near the sun's poles and travel at about 2.9 million kph. The slow one flows from the equatorial region of the sun at about 720,000 kph to 1.8 million kph.
. . The fast solar wind is so much faster because the magnetic fields that loop out from the polar regions are always "open", meaning they don't loop back toward the sun's surface. So "all the gas can keep streaming out, there's nothing to stop it", Harra said.
. . At the equator, on the other hand, there are both closed and open magnetic fields, and the closed fields hold the solar plasma back. Only when the fields open, can the solar wind stream out from the region.

Apr 4, 08: Venus may harbor active volcanoes that produce the high amounts of sulfur dioxide in its atmosphere. Scientists debate whether the sulfur dioxide detected by the European Space Agency's Venus Express comes from recent volcanic eruptions, or simply lingers on from eruptions that happened as far back as 10 million years ago.
. . Sulfur compounds don't stay long in Earth's atmosphere because they eventually react with the planetary surface, but they may take longer to react with surface rocks on Venus.
. . Scientists hope they can confirm or disprove active volcanoes on Venus, either by looking for local plumes of gas rising from volcanoes or finding hot spots on the surface that suggest fresh lava flows. That only adds up to more work ahead for Venus Express.

Apr 3, 08: An ambitious vision to take people to Luna and Mars may fall apart before it even gets off the ground because of uncertain planning and inadequate funding, several experts said.

Apr 14, 08: Scientists are still finding the humongous holes left here by long ago impacting space rocks. At last count, there were more than 170 known impact craters on our planet, according to the Earth Impact Database maintained by the U of New Brunswick in Canada. These puncture wounds are littered over every continent, as well as the seafloor.
. . Geologists get really excited about complex craters, such as Manicouagan in Quebec, Canada. Scientists estimate this crater is more than a thousand times wider than Barringer, and was made more than 200 million years ago.
. . A major heavyweight is South Africa's Vredefort crater, which, at 300 km wide, is said to be Earth's largest verified impact crater. At more than 2 billion years old, it is also one of the most ancient.
. . Other contenders are the 250 km-wide Sudbury Basin in Ontario, Canada, and the roughly 180 km-wide Chicxulub crater, half submerged off the coast of the Yucat?n Peninsula in Mexico. The latter can claim fame as the landing spot of the planetisimal that purportedly killed the dinosaurs, along with most life on Earth.

Apr 10, 08: Planetisimals that strike Earth have cosmic origins, but clues to the size of ancient impactors now have come from a decidedly Earth-bound source: the chemistry of ancient seawater.
. . The impactors may leave behind certain chemical traces in ancient ocean-floor sediments that can act as a telltale sign of their impact and record what was floating around in the seawater in the distant geologic past. The new study has found higher levels of a particular isotope of the element osmium in ocean sediment layers that correspond to the timing of known impacts.
. . When an planetisimal hits, it vaporizes into miniscule particles "and everything rains down in the ocean", Paquay explained. By examining the ratios of two osmium isotopes in ocean sediment cores, scientists can identify points in our planet's history when there was an impact.
. . They can also use the isotope levels to estimate the size of impactors. Interestingly, Paquay's estimates are at odds with those from model projections taken from known crater sizes, such as the Chicxulub crater thought to be made by an planetisimal impact that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Paquay's study estimates this planetisimal was about 4 to 6 km in diameter, but previous estimates from models put it at a whopping 15 to 19 km. Paquay says he is confident in estimates made by his method and that further research will eventually square the estimates made with different methods.

Apr 1, 08: Images of a tsunami blasting its way through the sun's lower atmosphere have been taken for the first time. NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft captured one of the massive solar waves in action.
. . They clocked the speed of the solar tsunamis at more than 1 million km per hour. The explosions release about two billion times the annual world's energy consumption in just a fraction of a second. The tsunami seemed to move just as speedily through dense layers as it did through less dense layers.
. . What causes these giant solar waves isn't clear. Astronomers know they are associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) which are like "a rope of gas and magnetic fields that gets accelerated away from the sun." Solar tsunamis could be the shockwave that results from the CME, or they could simply be related phenomena that have a common trigger. But whenever they see a solar tsunami, there's always an associated CME.

Apr 1, 08: A shower of shooting stars has been recorded by instruments on Mars for the first time, astronomers say. Meteors have been spotted before by the Mars rovers, but no device has ever detected a full shower until now. Scientists think four times as many comets dust Mars with their tails compared to our home planet, as a high proportion of comets hang out near Jupiter.

Mar 31, 08: Dangerous levels of radiation in space could bar astronauts from a mission to Mars and limit prolonged activity on Luna, experts now caution. However, more research could reveal ways to handle the risks that radiation poses to space missions.
. . Astronauts have long seen white flashes while in space due to cosmic rays, or extremely high-energy particles, passing through their heads. A return to Luna or a mission to Mars that NASA and other space agencies are planning would place astronauts at continued risk from cosmic rays or dangerous bursts of solar radiation.
. . The National Research Council assembled experts in space and biology together. At the present time, given current knowledge, the level of radiation astronauts would encounter "would not allow a human crew to undertake a Mars mission and might also seriously limit long-term Moon activity", this committee notes.
. . Spacecraft designers and mission planners have to consider trading off a safe amount of protective material —-say, high density plastic-— with cutting weight in order to enter space practically. Crafts that are too heavy simply can't carry enough fuel to make flight practical. Further research could not only look into better shielding materials, but also spacecraft designs that put electronics and machinery in the periphery between astronauts and harm's way. "Lava tubes on Luna might also be useful as habitats from a shielding point of view."

Mar 31, 08: If Martian life existed a few billion years ago, scientists think any plant-like microbes would have left behind a stringy fuzz of fibers.
. . That's because here on Earth, researchers now say they have found such ancient fuzz, called cellulose, preserved in chunks of salt deposited more than 250 million years ago — making it the oldest biological substance yet recovered. The announcement comes about a week after a team of planetary scientists announced discovering evaporated salt deposits on Mars and adds another element of hope to the search for alien life or signs of its past biology.
. . The 253-million-year-old cellulose fibers Griffith and others found are essentially the same stringy molecules that give wood its toughness. "Cellulose fibers are just strings of glucose sugar molecules stuck together, end on end", Griffith said. "You can dissolve glucose, but as cellulose it resists some of the harshest chemicals and conditions out there."

Mar 27, 08: A massive whirling vortex recently discovered over Saturn's south pole has features that are similar to hurricanes on Earth and unlike anything astronomers have seen before, a new study finds. Its eye alone measures about 4,000 km in diameter. The eye of a typical terrestrial hurricane is often just 3 or 5 km wide.
. . Exactly what drives the vortex is uncertain, but it's not the warm ocean moisture that fuels hurricanes on Earth. Dyudina said that it could be supported by the moisture-driven motion of clouds in the lower atmosphere, but that scientists have no way to tell just yet. The vortex also differs from hurricanes because it is stationary, constantly spinning over the same portion of the south pole.

Mar 26, 08: An international spacecraft that dove through geysers erupting from the surface of a Saturn moon has sampled an organic soup from the lunar interior, scientists said. The presence of the organic brew excited mission team members, who say it's a marker for further research into whether the icy satellite Enceladus possesses an environment that could be hospitable to extraterrestrial life. The chemical analysis by the unmanned Cassini spacecraft revealed that Enceladus' interior was similar to that of a comet.
. . The south pole is warmer than previously thought. Temperature measurements show the region is at least minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit — 63 degrees hotter than previously known --some 93 degrees C warmer than the rest of the moon's surface. Cassini scientist John Spencer said the high temperatures likely indicates that liquid water may lurk beneath the surface.
. . Organic molecules such as methane, propane, acetylene and formaldehyde were sniffed in Enceladus' icy plumes. While the jet plumes were mostly water vapor, the probe found traces of methane and simple organic compounds. "We clearly have the organics and are closing in on the question of liquid water in the interior", Waite said. Cassini will have to gather more data before a key element —-liquid water-— can be verified to exist on the moon. Another possibility is the geochemistry going on in the interior can also produce organics." Waite added.

Mar 24, 08: Three rocks hurtling through space appear to be among our solar system's oldest objects. The ancient planetisimals seem to have formed some 4.55 billion years ago, making them older than the oldest meteorites ever found on Earth, said Jessica Sunshine, an astronomer at the U of Maryland who led the team.
. . "These planetisimals are prime candidates for future space missions that could collect and return samples to Earth." They contain two to three times the amount of calcium- and aluminum-rich material of any space rock found on Earth.

Mar 20, 08: An ocean seasoned with the chemical ingredients of life may lie hidden beneath the icy surface of Saturn's moon Titan. The evidence? The entire surface of Titan appears to be sliding around, scientists say, like cheese over tomato sauce on a slice of pizza.
. . Titan is the largest of the more than 50 known moons orbiting Saturn, and is in fact bigger than the planet Mercury. Titan possesses a thick, planet-like atmosphere —-the only moon in the Solar System known to have one. And the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons revealed a surface at Titan covered with icy mountains, oily lakes and seas and what might be "cryovolcanoes" that spew plumes of water and ammonia.
. . They found evidence that some features on the moon's surface had drifted. Their research suggests that winds in Titan's dense atmosphere might actually rock the moon back and forth on its axis, influencing how it spins. The winds can accelerate the small moon's rotation speed and then, as the winds change with the seasons, they can decelerate it.
. . "Titan's winds should spool up and spin down with the seasons, and because Titan's atmosphere is so massive and Titan is relatively small, the winds have a measurable impact on Titan's rotation," Lorenz said. "If you adjust the parameters of how Titan rotates very slightly, we could make the features on the maps match up."
. . The size of these shifts hints that Titan's crust and core have to be separated by a liquid ocean to allow the atmosphere to move the crust around. Titan is about 5,150 km in diameter. The hidden ocean may be 100 to 200 km thick and its ice crust may be 50 to 150 km thick, Lorenz said. Beneath that may be a few hundred miles of a heavier form of ice "that you get at higher pressures", he explained, on top of a rocky core roughly 3,000 km to 3,400 km wide. This underground ocean is likely mostly water with a dash of ammonia.
. . However, there might be another explanation other than a hidden ocean behind these findings. Titan might have a reoccurring wobble in its orbit, said NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory planetologist Christophe Sotin, who did not participate in this study. To confirm if Titan has an underground sea or not, Sotin said, Cassini would need to observe that moon for another six years to see if its spin slows down, as would be expected if there was a subterranean ocean.

Mar 20, 08: Mars appears to be covered in salt crystals from ancient dried-up lakes, new evidence suggests. A Nasa probe has found signs that the southern hemisphere is dusted with chloride mineral, perhaps "table salt".
. . US scientists think the mineral formed when water evaporated from salty lakes or soil billions of years ago. The deposits, similar to salt-pans on Earth, are a good place to search for traces of past life preserved in salt, they report.
. . The evidence comes from a camera on Mars Odyssey, which has been mapping the Red Planet since early 2002. He said many of the deposits lay in basins with channels leading into them, the kind of feature that is consistent with water flowing in over a long time. He thinks the deposits formed about four billion years ago, when Mars was probably much warmer and wetter.
. . Locations range in area from one square kilometer to about 25 square kilometers, which approaches the size of some of the largest lakes on Earth. Some of the oldest organisms ever discovered on Earth have been found locked away in salt crystals, and that there may be Martian life forms entombed in the new crumbly flats that are about 1 to 3 meters thick.
. . "Salt is also an excellent means of preserving organic material, so if there was life present in the distant past, the signature might still be there." The scientists say the areas with chloride minerals should be given a high priority for future rover missions to Mars.

Mar 19, 08: Space is littered with millions of bits of orbiting garbage leftover from missions. The flying flotsam can delay launches and could potentially smash into spacecraft. Now some creative ideas are emerging for how to sweep up the junk. One idea even involves an oversized NERF ball.
. . Last year, the intentional destruction of China's Fengyun-1C weather satellite sent at least 150,000 bits of orbital debris less than one cm across and larger into space.
. . The trashiest region of space lies within low Earth orbit, located at 2,000 km above the Earth's surface. Space junk can also be found to a lesser degree in geosynchronous orbit—situated higher at 35,785 km above the Earth. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network is tracking about 18,000 orbiting objects of debris about two 5cm in diameter and larger.
. . Because the trash zips around the planet at around 7 to 8 km per second, at least in low Earth oOrbit, the physical makeup of space debris —-especially those pieces that are five centimeters and larger-— is not really important. "It could be made out of Jell-O or foam or stainless steel. When it's that big, it travels at orbital velocities and it hits something else, it's going to be a bad day."
. . To date, there is only one recorded incident of a collision in which the debris was large enough to track. In 1996, a French satellite called CERISE was struck by a piece of a French rocket that had exploded 10 years earlier.
. . The Chinese anti-satellite test exceeded the debris generated in any other year, ever. Unfortunately, it's very long-lived debris; it will be up there for decades or even a century or more."
. . Ground-based or space-based lasers could also perturb orbits and push the junk to lower altitudes so they would fall back to Earth quicker. (The glitch: Lasers are very expensive and limited in the number of objects they can interact with.)
. . Trash-collector vehicles could rendezvous with a chunk of debris and latch onto it before dragging it into a lower orbit, or higher orbit, depending on its current location. Specially-designed vehicles could rendezvous with old rocket bodies, for instance, and attach a propulsion system or so-called drag augmentation device onto the object.

Mar 17, 08: The Red Planet had a fiery and watery past. New research reveals that beginning about 3.5 billion years ago, five episodes of violent volcanic activity spewed lava and hot water onto the Martian surface, sculpting the landscape into the dimpled world we see today. Unlike on Earth, researchers say, the fashioning of the Martian surface has proceeded in spurts and stops.
. . The team estimated five volcanic periods: 3.5 billion years ago, 1.5 billion years ago, between 400 million and 800 million years ago, 200 million years ago and 100 million years ago. The dates of the earlier episodes, Neukum estimates, are correct to within 100 million to 200 million years and the later dates are correct to within 20 million to 30 million years.
. . The most recent activity on Olympus Mons, Mars's largest volcano, occurred at the summit around 150 million years ago, with minor flows in some areas as recent as 2 million years ago.
. . The bursts of volcanic activity could be explained by plate tectonics, or lack thereof. Whereas Earth is covered with a puzzle of rocky slabs called plates, Mars is a one-plate planet. Over time, heat from Mars's interior builds up and can cause the crust to crack in some areas, releasing fiery magma (called lava when it reaches the surface). The internal heat generated by the volcanic activity also may have caused water to erupt from the interior, leading to wide-scale flash flooding.
. . These episodes might not be over. "The interior of the planet is not cold yet, so this could happen again."

Mar 17, 08: Newfound glowing spots on Jupiter seem unexpectedly to come from electron beams whipping around the giant planet's volcanic moon Io. Io is the most volcanic body in the solar system, with its entire surface likely made up of lava from the moon's hundreds of volcanoes. Io also causes glowing spots hundreds of km across on its mother planet that are similar to the aurora borealis or northern lights in the Northern Hemisphere on Earth.
. . As Jupiter spins, its magnetic field sweeps past Io, stripping off roughly 1 ton of matter off Io every second. This matter becomes electrically charged plasma in the magnetic field, forming a doughnut-shaped cloud. As Io orbits the planet, plasma surges around it like rivers do around boulders, creating waves that blast Jupiter's atmosphere with electrons to create auroras.

Mar 14, 08: One of Saturn's moons may once have harbored a liquid ocean beneath its icy surface, scientists have told a major conference.
. . Tethys is a mid-sized satellite with a density close to that of pure ice. But a large valley system visible today must have formed when the crust was being heated and under great strain. The team thinks that tidal heating, followed by cooling which froze Tethys' ocean, could have formed the giant Ithaca Chasma rift.
. . Calculations show that tidal interactions were the only viable way of providing the amount of heat associated with the formation of Ithaca Chasma.
. . They propose that Tethys' orbit around Saturn was once perturbed by gravitational interactions with another moon --Dione-- which made Tethys' orbit more "eccentric". The resulting tidal forces caused frictional heating of Tethys' interior. But at some point, the orbital interaction between Tethys and Dione was broken, and Tethys fell back into a less eccentric orbit. As it did so, it began to cool.
. . Freezing of a liquid ocean would have generated sufficient stresses in the crust to form Ithaca Chasma, the researchers said. They speculated that it could have been 100km deep at some point.

Mar 14, 08: The Cassini spacecraft has beamed home the most detailed views yet of Saturn's moon Enceladus despite a software glitch that prevented a key instrument from sampling the satellite's geyser-like ice plumes during a flyby.
. . Cassini whipped by Enceladus at a clip of about 51,500 kph during the first of several swings past the icy moon of its extended mission. Scientists on Earth were hoping not only to photograph the moon, but also determine the composition of its water-ice geysers using a particle analyzing spectrometer and other instruments.
. . But one tool, known as the Cosmic Dust Analyzer and Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer, hung up while switching between two versions of software and did not record data as Cassini flew through the plumes.
. . The success of yesterday's daring and very low-altitude flyby --50 km-- means this coming summer's very close encounter, when we get exquisitely detailed images of the surface sources of Enceladus' south polar jets, should be an exciting 'next big step' in understanding just how the jets are powered."
. . Although Cassini's cosmic dust-analyzing spectrometer failed to observe the composition and size of Enceladus' plume material, four other instruments functioned perfectly.

Mar 14, 08: The European Space Agency (ESA) could send a robot rover to Luna in order to carry out science and test important technologies for the future. ESA is developing the MoonNext concept, which at present is being targeted for a 2015 launch. Esa's chief scientist said the mission could land at Luna's south pole.
. . Temperatures at Luna's south pole hover around -40C, while Luna's equator experiences wild extremes of temperature. In addition, the lander would be able to survive at the pole using solar power because scientists have identified two well illuminated ridges here where the sun hardly ever sets.
. . These lie just a few kilometers from the rim of Shackleton Crater, a 19km-wide, 2km-deep impact depression that has often been proposed as the landing site for a future manned lunar mission. Previous data indicated that water brought by cometary impacts on Luna might lie permanently frozen on the floor of Shackleton Crater.

Mar 13, 08: Large volumes of water ice have probably been detected below Mars' surface, far from the planet's polar ice caps, scientists have said. The radar data suggest that some of these features consist mostly of ice.
. . The Sharad radar experiment, on Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft made the discovery in Mars' mid-northern latitudes. The ice is found in distinctive geological structures on Mars' surface that are hundreds of meters thick.
. . Sharad (SHAllow RADar) is able to probe up to 1km beneath the Martian surface. Analysis of those waves that penetrate the soil and bounce back can give information on transitions between materials with different properties, such as rock and liquid water.
. . Mission scientists used Sharad to probe Martian surface features known as lobate debris aprons (LDAs). These distinctive, dome-shaped structures are concentrated around mid-latitudes in the planet's northern and southern hemispheres.
. . The researchers looked at LDAs in the Deuteronilus Mensae region of Mars' northern hemisphere, where the features can be found at the bases of valley walls, craters and scarps of mesas. Scientists have long suspected that LDAs were flows consisting of mixed up rock and ice. The radar penetrated these geological features with very little attenuation (reduction in signal strength), suggesting they were predominantly made of ice. "We would say, robustly, more than 50% ice by volume - but it could be much more", said Jeff Plaut.

Mar 13, 08: Nobody knows how life on Earth began, but the primordial soup likely got a lot of its ingredients from space. Scientists have discovered concentrations of amino acids in two meteorites that are more than ten times higher than levels previously measured in other similar meteorites.
. . Amino acids are organic molecules that form the backbone of proteins, which in turn build many of the structures and drive many of the chemical reactions inside living cells. The production of proteins is believed to constitute one of the first steps in the emergence of life. So the finding suggests that the early Solar System was far richer in the organic building blocks of life than scientists had thought.
. . Ammonia and other chemical precursors from the solar nebula, or even the interstellar medium, could have combined in the presence of water to make the amino acids. Then, after the break up, some of the fragments could have showered down onto the Earth and the other terrestrial planets. These same precursors are likely to have been present in other primitive bodies, such as comets, that were also raining material onto the early Earth."

Mar 11, 08: NASA's Cassini spacecraft will zip through the edges of immense frozen water vapor geysers gushing from fractures in the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The flyby is Cassini's first of four swings past icy Enceladus this year, where the spacecraft will use onboard instruments to "sniff and taste" the satellite's Old Faithful-like water-ice eruptions
. . At its closest approach, Cassini will skim just 50 km above the surface of Enceladus before passing through the moon's icy plume at an altitude of about 190 km. The spacecraft will zoom past Enceladus at about 51,875 kph, snapping photos during on approach and departure that will return the first-ever views of some northern regions
. . Cassini first spotted Enceladus' icy plume in 2005, when its onboard instruments recorded water vapor geysers rushing out to distances of up to three times the 499-km wide moon's diameter. The ice particles themselves are tiny, just one ten-thousandth of an inch --about the width of a human hair-- but jet out of Enceladus at about 1,287 kph.
. . The apparently continuous eruptions appear to periodically give Enceladus a fresh coat of surface material and spew out ice dust that bolsters Saturn's faint E-ring. The flyby will take the probe through the plumes of icy particles emanating from the enigmatic cracks at the south pole dubbed the "tiger stripes". This should help scientists address the tantalizing issue of whether there is an ocean under Enceladus' icy crust.
. . The spacecraft will be turned to give the prime view to its Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) and its Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA). These instruments will measure the density, size, composition and speed of the gas and the particles. There will be no really close-up images from the pass --in order to give the INMS and the CDA the ideal observing position, it means the spacecraft must be orientated in a way that results in its optical imaging equipment being turned towards space. The cameras will get to image Enceladus on the way in and out, however.
. . If there is a substantial body of liquid water below the surface being sustained by an energy source, it means Enceladus would have at least some of the key ingredients needed for microbial life. Hence, the need to learn more.

Mar 6, 08: A lake that might once have been habitable may have filled a crater for a long time on early Mars, new spacecraft images reveal. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured the images that suggest the debris-strewn Holden Crater once held a calm body of water that could have harbored life.
. . The crater debris includes a mix of broken boulders and smaller particles called megabreccia. "Both contain minerals that formed in the presence of water and mark potentially habitable environments. This would be an excellent place to send a rover or sample-return mission. That mission could be NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, set for launch next year. The Holden Crater is one of six landing sites under consideration.
. . The Holden impact crater formed inside a larger impact basin that was crisscrossed by large, natural channels. Blocks as large as 50 meters were blasted from the basin by the impact, before falling back to the surface.
. . The first long watery period at Holden Crater probably lasted thousands of years, while the second lake that formed after the crater rim was breached may have lasted just hundreds of years, Grant added.

Mar 6, 08: Saturn's second-largest moon Rhea may have a small ring around it --the first time a moon has been found to have a ring, an international team of researchers reported. The ring probably formed when a smaller body smashed into Rhea and sent out a stream of debris that began orbiting the moon, said Iannis Dandouras, a planetary scientist. The findings from the Cassini spacecraft will help scientists better understand how planets form.
. . The four largest planets in the solar system --Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn and Uranus-- all have rings, and Earth probably had one as well at some point billions of years ago, before Luna even existed.
. . The researchers believe the latest data point to a ring because when Cassini recently flew past Rhea they detected a surprising lack of electrons surrounding the moon. Rhea lies within a magnetized bubble that surrounds Saturn and contains trapped ions and electrons. Because of this, the researchers expected to see electrons trailing off closer to the surface as the moon absorbed them. Instead, the electrons disappeared much sooner --as if something was blocking them-- leaving a ring of debris as the most likely explanation, Jones said.

Mar 4, 08: A French astronaut is tending a miniature garden on the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the first experiment.

Mar 3, 08: A NASA spacecraft has taken the first-ever image of an avalanche in action near Mars' north pole. The image shows tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a towering slope, where ice and dust have just cascaded down.
. . The camera was tracking seasonal changes on Mars when it inadvertently caught the avalanche on film. The full image reveals features as small as a desk in a strip of terrain 6 km wide and more than 60km long. Reddish layers known to be rich in water ice make up the face of a steep slope more than 700 meters tall, running the length of the image.
. . "If blocks of ice broke loose and fell, we expect the water in them will be changing from solid to gas", said Patrick Russell of the U of Berne, Switzerland, a HiRISE team collaborator. "We'll be watching to see if blocks and other debris shrink in size."
. . The image, taken last month, reveals at least four avalanches of fine ice and dust breaking off from a steep cliff and settling on the slope below. The cascade kicked up massive debris clouds, with some measuring more than 180 meters across.

Feb 29, 08: Mysteriously, five spacecraft that flew past the Earth have each displayed unexpected anomalies in their motions. These newfound enigmas join the so-called "Pioneer anomaly" as hints that unexplained forces may appear to act on spacecraft.
. . A decade ago, after rigorous analyses, anomalies were seen with the identical Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft as they hurtled out of the Solar System. Both seemed to experience a tiny but unexplained constant acceleration toward the sun.
. . Now Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer John Anderson and his colleagues —-who originally helped uncover the Pioneer anomaly-— have discovered that five spacecraft each raced either a tiny bit faster or slower than expected when they flew past the Earth en route to other parts of the solar system. The fact this effect seems most evident with flybys most asymmetrical with respect to Earth's equator "suggests that the anomaly is related to Earth's rotation", Anderson said.
. . As to whether these new anomalies are linked with the Pioneer anomaly, "I would be very surprised if we have discovered two independent spacecraft anomalies."

Feb 29, 08: In a blow to hopes for finding water and life on Mars, scientists think bright streaks detected inside Martian gullies after 1999 were not spurts of water, but rather avalanches of dust.

Feb 28, 08: When astronauts return to Luna in a few years they'll be using NASA's new 3D lunar maps. Produced using Earth-based radar measurements, the maps of the south polar region show details as small as 20 meters across and record heights to within 5 meters— 30 times more accurate than previous surveys.

Feb 28, 08: Venus is made of the same stuff of Earth, but is bone-dry, hot enough to melt lead and has a chokingly thick atmosphere. It even spins backwards.
. . Astronomers have spent decades trying to explain Venus' mysterious properties. Now one scientist thinks the planet's formation may explain all: Two huge, protoplanetary bodies collided head-on and merged to form our planetary neighbor, but obliterated nearly all water in the process.
. . A majority of scientists think Luna formed when a protoplanet about the size of Mars smacked into the planet at an angle. Davies thinks Venus was born of a far worse cosmic train wreck. A mega-collision between two bodies of roughly equal size could have provided the energy necessary to rip water into pieces. The hydrogen would escape into space while oxygen would bond with iron and sink to the planet's core.
. . Although the Earth suffered a catastrophic impact that formed Luna, Davies explained that the process did not dry out the two bodies. "It wasn't as energetic, limiting the reaction of iron and water", he said. "Venus has virtually no oxygen, whereas Earth's atmosphere is about 20% oxygen," Davies said. "If not trapped in the atmosphere, then rocks would have to absorb it." And evidence from Venus, he said, does not suggest that this is the case.
. . Another clue that Davies said gives his theory legs is the odd rotation of Venus. The planet rotates in a clockwise or retrograde direction, which is the opposite spin of every planet in the solar system. "Another peculiarity is that it has no moon", Davies said. "If the head-on impact I've hypothesized was a little off of the mark, it could explain Venus' retrograde rotation without making a moon."
. . Alan Boss, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., thinks massive collisions —-including head-on mergers-— were the norm for terrestrial plants early in their histories. Boss explained that if a Venusian moon formed via a giant impact, its orbit could have decayed and spiralled the body into the planet's surface.
. . Davies thinks the simpler explanation is his own. Aside from planning to create a detailed computer model for the hypothesized mega-collision, as has been done for moon formation theory, Davies said another way to test his idea is to send a new spacecraft to Venus.
. . Russia's space program successfully landed nearly 10 spacecraft on Venus' surface in the 1970s and 1980s. But Davies said none of them scouted for water-containing minerals such as mica —-evidence that would challenge his hypothesis. "The longest any spacecraft has lasted is less than two hours."

Feb 28, 08: Luna's south pole region, a possible future landing site for human or robotic lunar missions, is far more rugged than had been thought, with towering peaks and deep craters, NASA said.
. . Using an Earth-based radar system in California's Mojave Desert, NASA looked at an area around Shackleton Crater, with some terrain in perpetual darkness and other areas almost always sunlit. The Shackleton Crater rim area is a landing site candidate for a future crewed mission to Luna, NASA said. There have been previous indications water ice might exist in darkened areas of the crater.
. . The region has a peak towering 6km --rivaling North America's tallest mountain, Mount McKinley in Alaska-- and craters 4km deep, NASA said. The scientists noted that the largest volcano on Earth --Mauna Loa in Hawaii-- would fit easily inside these depths. "Having water ice gives us a source of water and gives us a source of hydrogen and oxygen, which can be made into fuel."

Feb 28, 08: The moon's south pole region, a possible future landing site for human or robotic lunar missions, is far more rugged than had been thought, with towering peaks and deep craters, NASA said.

Feb 27, 08: Scientists are priming two spacecraft to slam into Luna's South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice.

Feb 26, 08: Theorists have predicted that our planet will fry as the sun expands in its old age. But the time estimates have varied by a couple billion years.
. . If 7.6 billion years doesn't sound like an urgent death sentence, don't relax yet. Regardless of whether Earth will ultimately be vaporized, as the sun heats up, our planet will become too hot to live on before then. "After a billion years or so you've got an Earth with no atmosphere, no water and a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees. Like all previous hominids and more than 99% of all species that have lived on Earth, humans will probably go extinct, and it will likely happen sooner than a billion years.
. . Smith's earlier studies found that Earth would narrowly escape being engorged. As the sun ages and expands into a red giant star, it will shed its outer gaseous layers, thus losing mass and weakening its gravitational pull. Previous calculations found that this let-up would allow the Earth's orbit to shift outward, enabling the planet to slip free of the smoldering sun. But this scenario doesn't account for tidal forces, and the drag of the sun's outer layers.
. . Some scientists have proposed a scheme for down the road to use the gravity of a passing planetisimal to budge Earth out of the way of the sun toward cooler territory, assuming there is life around at the time that is intelligent enough to engineer this solution. "If it's done right, that would just keep the Earth moving fast enough to keep it out of harm's way. Maybe life could go on for as much as 7 billion years."

Feb 21, 08: Google and X PRIZE officials unveiled nine new privately funded teams today that will compete for $30 million in the Google Lunar X PRIZE challenge, a race to Luna.

Feb 21, 08: Ulysses, a US-European space scout that has been orbiting the Sun for 17 years, almost four times its expected lifetime, is on the brink of dying, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
. . A radioactive isotope provides Ulysses with power for communications and scientific equipment and for onboard heaters to warm its hydrazine fuel. But the isotope source is running low, and the craft can no longer send back large quantities of data, nor can it ward off the deep chill of space. As a result, the fuel lines will freeze up in the next month or two.

Feb 21, 08: Earth is doomed to fry and then be gobbled up by the dying Sun. The planet's demise is 7.6 billion years away. As the Sun runs out of fuel, it will expand into a dangerous "red giant".
. . But Earth --while battered and burnt to a crisp-- would escape ultimate destruction, he had thought. Smith, working with Klaus-Peter Schroeder at the U of Guanajuato in Mexico, has taken a new run through the figures. Sadly, for our home, the number is up.
. . "The tenuous outer atmosphere of the Sun extends a long way beyond its visible surface, and it turns out the Earth would actually be orbiting within these very low-density outer layers," Smith says. The drag caused by this low-density gas is enough to cause the Earth to drift inwards, and finally to be captured and vaporized by the Sun."
. . A billion years from now, as the Sun slowly expands, the oceans will evaporate, filling the atmosphere with water vapor (a potent greenhouse gas) and triggering runaway global warming.
. . Smith sketches two options, both admittedly sci-fi in feel, for escaping this fate. One is to harness the gravitational pull of a passing asteroid to gently tug Earth out of the danger zone. A wee nudge every 6,000 years could be enough to survive for at least five billion years.
. . "A safer solution may be to build a fleet of interplanetary 'life rafts' that could manouvre themselves always out of reach of the Sun but close enough to use its energy", he says. [No, I donno what that means either.]

Feb 21, 08: Mars' seasonal polar caps are 99% CO2 ice.

Feb 21, 08: Virgin Galactic, billionaire Richard Branson's space travel venture, plans to order five more spaceships and aims to turn a profit in five years from its commercial launch in 2010.

Feb 20, 08: Sudden, tremendous gushes of water from underground most likely carved out unusual fan-shaped geological formations with steps like a staircase long ago on the surface of Mars, scientists said. The Martian surface boasts perhaps 200 large basins that have formations resembling fans. About 10 of them are terraced, with what looks like steps into the basin. Since they were first seen three years ago, scientists have debated how these formations, some of them 9 miles wide, were created.
. . Dutch and U.S. researchers simulated on Earth on a vastly smaller scale the conditions that might have led to these formations on Mars that resemble dry river deltas with steps. These Martian formations probably formed quickly --in a period of decades not hundreds, thousands or millions of years. And they involved a lot of water. "What you could imagine is something like the Mississippi River flowing for 10 years and then turning off."
. . Kraal said the large volume of water needed to carve out these formations billions of years ago most likely burst from beneath the surface of the planet. "It doesn't look like it came from precipitation, or from rain. It looks like it came from a hydrothermal source or from melting ice", Kraal said.
. . Currently, there are huge deposits of frozen water at the poles. And images taken by a NASA spacecraft suggest the presence of a small amount of liquid water on the surface. The images showed changes in the walls of two craters apparently caused by the downhill flow of water in the past few years.

Feb 20, 08: Nasa is to invest $170m in Orbital Sciences Corporation to develop a resupply ship for the space station.

Feb 19, 08: If humans live on the moon some day, they might turn on the weather forecast just as they do on Earth. But in space, they won't fear rain storms, but sun storms. During a solar radiation storm, the sun emits huge sprays of charged particles that can disable satellites and would harm humans in space if they're not properly protected. Although these storms are notoriously difficult to predict, a new method of forecasting storms can give up to an hour's warning.

Feb 15, 08: The Red Planet was too salty to sustain life for much of its history, according to the latest evidence gathered by the Opportunity rover on the Martian surface. High concentration of minerals in water on early Mars would have made it inhospitable to even the toughest micro organisms, a leading Nasa expert says.
. . Clues preserved in rocks that were once awash with water suggest the environment was both acidic and briny. In fact, it was salty enough that only a handful of known terrestrial organisms would have a ghost of a chance of surviving there when conditions were at their best.

Feb 14, 08: The first triple planetisimal near Earth has been discovered. Astronomers have found plenty of double, or binary planetisimals. Triples are known to exist, too (the first triple was found in 2005). But the system called 2001 SN263 is the closest triple, at just 11.2 million km from Earth. The main rock is spherical and about 2 km wide. Another is about half that size. The smallest is about 1,000 feet across.
. . It was originally found in 2001, but new observations with the radar telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico reveal it is three gravitationally bound rocks.

Feb 13, 08: Data from the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn has shown that the ringed planet's moon has "hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth", according to research. Lakes are scattered across the moon, with each of several dozen holding more hydrocarbon liquid –-largely in the form of methane and ethane-- than all of Earth's oil and gas reserves.

Feb 12, 08: New research has revealed the seemingly gentle touchdowns of the six Apollo Lunar Modules (LMs) on Luna between 1969 and 1972 were actually incredibly violent events. The Lunar Module's descent engine blew out high-velocity lunar particles that strafed the landscape. These minute specks of lunar dust are estimated to have been propelled at speeds of between 0.6 and 1.5 miles per second (up to 5,400 mph or 8,690 kph). That's nearly fast enough to escape Luna's gravity and enter orbit around the sun.

Feb 11, 08: How's this for a travel itinerary: First stop, Lake Mendota in Wisconsin. Then a little trip under a frozen Antarctic lake, and finally a blowout finish under the icy seas of the Jovian moon Europa. That's roughly the plan for the Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) probe, a NASA-funded project designed to make 3D maps of underwater environments, take microbial samples and gather other data on difficult-to-reach depths.
. . Well into the future, the idea is to use similar technology to explore Europa's oceans of liquid water, which are trapped beneath the moon's icy surface. That's when things will get really interesting.

Feb 8, 08: Cosmic sprinklers that spurt misty jets from cracks along Saturn's sixth largest moon could hint at a vast watery lake hidden beneath the icy shell of Enceladus. New research provides a clear view of the processes beneath the moon's crust that yield the handful of geysers.
. . The results reveal there must be water beneath the moon's surface and also support the idea that Enceladus' geysers are the source of Saturn's E-ring, a faint circle of tiny ice and dust particles. "It might be a global ocean. It might be just a small lake."
. . Both the model and the Cassini observations suggest the vapor in the plumes moves at roughly the same speed as a supersonic jet, about 650 to 1,100 mph (300 to 500 meters per second). That's nearly double the speed needed to escape Enceladus' gravity. Only about 10% of the ice particles have enough energy to break through Enceladus' gravity. The remaining slowpokes fall back to the moon's surface.
. . The next Enceladus flyby is set for March, when the Cassini spacecraft will reach its closest approach of a mere 50 km from the surface. As the spacecraft moves farther away to an altitude of about 200 km, it will pass through and sample Enceladus' plumes.

Feb 6, 08: Scientists said they have an explanation how one of Saturn's moons can spew out a giant plume of water vapor, adding to evidence a source of life --water-- lies beneath the moon's frozen surface. Using a computer model, German researchers showed the temperature at the bottom of surface cracks on Enceladus has to be about 0 degrees Celsius, the so-called triple point of water where vapor, ice and liquid water all can coexist.
. . Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa and Enceladus are the only places in the solar system with direct evidence of water. Scientists have taken an especially close look at Enceladus because it seems to have a smooth surface --suggesting recent geological activity that, in turn, could mean liquid water. They are also intrigued by the plume itself, a gigantic geyser of water vapor and tiny ice particles. One mystery was how the dust particles slowed down to keep the plume restrained by the gravity of the moon. Their model showed most of the dust particles collide with the walls of the surface crack as they are ejected and constrain the gas flow.
. . Cassini is scheduled to fly 50 km over the moon's surface in March.

Feb 6, 08: The U.S. space agency is planning a mission to better understand a mysterious form of energy in the cosmos and an ambitious unmanned journey to the outer solar system, NASA officials said. NASA would initiate seven new science missions in fiscal year 2009 that starts October 1.
. . NASA is planning to begin work on a mission to send a spacecraft to either Jupiter or Saturn with the idea of orbiting one of three moons. Two of the three moons under consideration orbit Jupiter: Europa, which boasts an ice-covered ocean that some scientists think is a candidate for harboring some form of life; and Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system.
. . The third option is Saturn's moon Titan, the second-biggest moon in the solar system. "By the end of this year, we will have it down to our final choice."
. . NASA also is planning a mission involving the launch by 2015 of an Earth-orbiting satellite to study dark energy, a mysterious force thought to cause the universe to expand at an accelerated pace.

Jan 30, 08: A fly-by by a Nasa unmanned space probe has revealed evidence of "widespread" volcanism on the planet Mercury. Only 45% of Mercury's surface had previously been mapped; Messenger has already covered a further 30% of the planet. The first pictures from the unseen side of Mercury reveal the wrinkles of a shrinking, aging planet. "Mercury doesn't look like the moon. It has very subtle red and blue areas."
. . The spacecraft also discovered a unique feature that scientists dubbed The Spider. This formation has never been seen on Mercury before, and nothing like it has been observed on the Moon. It lies in the middle of a large impact crater called the Caloris basin and consists of more than 100 narrow, flat-floored troughs radiating from a 40km-wide central crater.
. . One of the most intriguing features, researchers said, was the discovery of a formation they're calling "The Spider" –-a group of more than 100 "narrow, flat-floored troughs radiating from a complex central region", in the middle of the massive Caloris Basin (a monster impact crater, which has had its size upgraded to about 960 miles across as a result of the flyby).
. . MESSENGER skimmed only 200 km over Mercury's surface on Jan. 14, in the first of three passes it will make by the planet before settling into orbit around it on March 18, 2011. The spacecraft snapped pictures of a feature the scientists informally call "the spider", which appears to be an impact crater surrounded by over 50 cracks in the surface radiating from its center.
. . "The only other example in our solar system of an Earth-like magnetosphere is tiny Mercury."

Jan 30, 08: A planetisimal once thought to be on a collision course with Mars passed the Red Planet today without incident. Newer observations kept lowering the odds for the 50 meter space rock. "Mars sees these kinds of near-miss encounters every ten or twenty years, but the impact rate for planetisimals this size is about once in a thousand years." "We were hoping for a spectacular show to reveal a lot", Chesley said. "We've actually never seen a significant impact on a terrestrial planet."
. . Mars is a smaller and harder target for space rocks to hit when compared with Earth, but about five times as many planetisimals cross the Martian orbit. 2007 WD5's path around the sun ranges from just outside Earth's orbit to the outer edge of the planetisimal belt between Mars and Jupiter, but will not impact with either Mars or Earth in the next century. It missed Mars by a distance of approximately 6.5 Mars radii.
. . The flyby occurred a day after a 500-foot planetisimal flew by Earth at a distance somewhat greater than from the Earth to the Moon.

Jan 30, 08: A planetisimal that exploded over Siberia a century ago, leaving 800 square miles of scorched or blown down trees, wasn't nearly as large as previously thought, a researcher concludes, suggesting a greater danger for Earth.
. . According to supercomputer simulations by Sandia National Laboratories physicist Mark Boslough, the planetisimal that destroyed the forest at Tunguska in Siberia in June 1908 had a blast force equivalent to one-quarter to one-third of the 10- to 20-megaton range scientists previously estimated.
. . On Tuesday, a planetisimal at least 800 feet long made a rare close pass by Earth, but scientists said there was no chance of an impact. The closest approach of 2007 TU24 will be 500,000 km —-about 1.4 times the distance of Earth to the moon. An actual collision of a similar-sized object with Earth occurs on average every 37,000 years.
. . The simulation, which better matches what's known of Tunguska than earlier models did, shows that the center of the planetisimal's mass exploded above the ground, taking the form of a fireball blasting downward faster than the speed of sound. But the fireball did not reach the ground, so while miles of trees outside the epicenter were flattened, those at the epicenter remained standing —-scorched, with their branches stripped off.

Jan 26, 08: Samples of rock dust retrieved from a comet called Wild 2 are forcing scientists to alter they way they think about these intriguing objects that streak through our solar system. A chemical analysis of the samples brought back to Earth by NASA's Stardust spacecraft showed that the comet is much more like an asteroid than scientists had expected.
. . A long-standing notion had been they were sort of a frozen time capsule of material from when the solar system formed 4-1/2 billion years ago, including stardust from other stars. But this is not the case with Wild 2, scientists found.
. . A lot of the material detected in Wild 2's cometary dust was formed very close to Sol in the early Solar System and was somehow later transported to the outer Solar System, the scientists said. The rock dust closely resembles material from bodies called chondritic meteorites from asteroids in the belt.

Jan 22, 08: Two giant plumes erupted recently on Jupiter, moving faster than any other Jovian feature and leaving global streaks of red cloud particles in their wake. New analyses of the March 2007 outbursts suggest internal heat plays a significant role in generating such weather patterns. "The infrared images distinguish the plumes from lower-altitude clouds and show that the plumes are lofting ice particles higher than anyplace else on the planet."

Jan 22, 08: When astronauts overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope this summer, they will leave behind a vastly more powerful orbital observatory to scan the universe. Set to launch aboard NASA's shuttle Atlantis on Aug. 7, the Hubble servicing mission will be the fifth --and final-- sortie to upgrade the aging space telescope. "We expect to make the very best discoveries of the entire two-decade plus Hubble program with the new instruments to be installed."
. . In addition to performing vital repairs, astronauts will add two new instruments to Hubble's observation platform's Wide Field Camera-3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that will drastically boost its vision range. "This refurbished Hubble [will be] a new telescope." That means that Hubble will be able to see at least 90 times more objects in deep space than it could when it was deployed in April 1990. "We will have the capability, literally, of approximately 100 Hubbles [circa] 1990 when this mission is done."
. . With its ability to scan the universe at wavelengths ranging from the near-infrared, visible spectrum to the near-ultraviolet, the new Wide Field Camera-3 should allow Hubble to see objects that formed fewer than 800 million years after the beginning of the universe.
. . Hubble's new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, meanwhile, will scan the universe in the ultraviolet range with about 10 times more sensitivity than the observatory's current tools.
. . They will also repair the observatory's Space Telescope Imaging Spectroscope and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), both of which were never designed to be fixed in orbit. Spacewalkers will remove more than 111 tiny screws to repair the two units.

Jan 22, 08: Powerful magnetic waves have been confirmed for the first time as major players in the process that makes the sun's atmosphere strangely hundreds of times hotter than its already superhot surface.

Jan 16, 08: With its thin atmosphere and scant moisture, Mars is often largely cloud-free. But new observations reveal clouds of dry ice thick enough to cast significant shadows on the red planet. Dust storms are known to shroud vast swaths of Mars. Clouds have been photographed from the ground before, too.
. . The new research finds that CO2, the main component of martian air, freezes into clouds so dense they dim the sun by about 40%.
. . The carbon-dioxide clouds are surprisingly high, some 80 km and are several hundred km wide. They're thicker than expected.
. . The clouds are made of particles that are larger than expected. The particles are more than a micron wide (one-thousandth of a millimeter). Normally, particles of this size would not be expected to form in the upper atmosphere or to stay aloft for very long before falling back toward the surface.
. . The clouds "cast quite a dense shadow and this has a noticeable effect on the local ground temperature", Montmessin said. "Temperatures in the shadow can be up to 10 degrees C cooler than their surroundings, and this in turn modifies the local weather, particularly the winds." On mars, bubbles of warm gas rise. At altitude, the CO2 condenses, the researchers explained. This releases heat, causing the gas and ice particles to rise higher.
. . On Earth, water vapor condenses around tiny particles, often dust or salt, to form clouds. It's not yet clear what the martian moisture is condensing around. The researcher said it could be dust, micrometeorites or tiny crystals of water ice.

Jan 9, 08: Spacecraft could soon take advantage of a sophisticated math algorithm that simulates evolution to find the best paths to distant planets and comets.
. . Engineers at the U of Missouri tweaked a mathematical approach called "differential evolution" so that it works quickly and efficiently to plot the best course for robotic deep space missions. "This helps you figure out trajectory, size up the spacecraft, how much fuel is needed, what kind of launch vehicles are needed ... all answers you need to get before going into the mission details."
. . The math algorithm treats possible solutions as individuals in a population, choosing a few each time to "mutate" and swap traits, then testing the mutants against the previous solutions. The best solutions win out and survive to the next generation, where the process may repeat again and again.

Jan 8, 08: A long-delayed and nearly canceled upgrade to the Hubble Space Telescope will have to wait until NASA completes delivery of three modules to the International Space Station, officials said today.
. . The orbiting space telescope that just won't quit collecting gobs of celestial data well beyond its expected twilight is set for a major tune-up and upgrade. This servicing mission will be the Hubble Space Telescope's fifth and last.
. . Word today is that the Space Shuttle Atlantis could lift off in August with a crew of seven astronauts and cargo of equipment, tools and new instruments for Hubble. Orbiting at about 563 km above Earth, Hubble's spent 16-plus years in orbit.
. . During the 11-day Hubble service mission, which will include five spacewalks, shuttle astronauts will install two new science instruments plus a set of gyroscopes to help stabilize the telescope, as well as batteries and thermal blankets to keep the observatory operating until at least 2013.
. . Astronauts will also install a soft capture mechanism that will allow a future unmanned spacecraft to dock with Hubble in about 2020 and de-orbit it for a controlled plunge and disposal in the ocean.

Jan 7, 08: Russia plans to participate in a European mission to investigate Jupiter's moon Europa and search for simple life forms. A project to explore the giant gaseous planet Jupiter would shortly be included in the program of the European Space Agency (ESA) for the years 2015 to 2025. Russia has suggested landing a craft in one of the fissures in Europa's icy crust. Having landed, the craft would melt some of the ice and search for life forms.

Jan 3, 08: Both of Saturn's poles have surprising swirling hotspots that persist even through years of polar winter. Saturn's chilly north pole boasts a hot spot of compressed air, a surprising discovery that could shed light on other planets within our own solar system and beyond, researchers said. Scientists already knew about a hot spot at Saturn's sunny south pole but data from the Cassini spacecraft now shows that the winter pole drenched in darkness also has a hot spot.
. . Researchers said the southern hot spot was probably formed by the warm rays of the sun but added compressed air descending from the atmosphere best explained the newly-found hot spot on the north pole. "The mass of air heats up as it's compressed."

The atmosphere at Mars' surface is similar to that of Earth at an altitude of 20 km. Some space rocks that target Earth explode under the pressure created as they stream into our atmosphere. But they tend not to explode until much below the 20K mark.

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