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Results tagged “craters” from Breaking Orbit

NASA Crashes the Moon Tomorrow Morning

Posted on October 8, 2009 | 1 Comments

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By James Robertson, National Geographic Digital Media

One of the coolest-sounding missions launched by NASA comes to an explosive end tomorrow morning.  The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (or LCROSS) will smash into the moon at about 4:30 a.m. PST (7:30 a.m. EST), followed by another impact four minutes later. (Read the National Geographic News preview NASA Moon "Bombings" Tomorrow: Sky Show, Water Expected.)

The first stage of the LCROSS is designed to kick up a huge plume of dust in the permanently dark Cabeus crater at the south pole of the moon. The second stage contains scientific equipment to collect the dust and determine if it contains water ice, before crashing into the moon itself and causing a purely gratuitous explosion. 

According to the mission's NASA page, amateur astronomers with a 10 to 12-inch telescope should be able to see the dust plumes created by the impacts.

If you don't have a telescope, you can watch the camera footage from the satellite and mission control at the Newseum in Washington, DC, at a special watch party on their 40-foot high video wall, at other locations around the world, or on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html.

You will also be able to watch video and read about the mission afterward on National Geographic News.

If water ice is found in the dust, it would confirm findings of water and hydroxyl molecules by NASA instruments aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft launched about a year ago.

Disclosure: James Robertson is a consultant for the Newseum.


HiRISE Spies a Young Martian Crater

Posted on January 23, 2009 | 0 Comments

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By now folks used to reading about Mars have gotten pretty spoiled by the amazing images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This fabulous camera came online in 2006 and returned its first color images of Mars in 2007.

The current catalog of more than 8,700 images is a study in how science can become art—rippling sand dunes and scalloped craters in gentle hues of blue and red can look more like exhibits at the MoMA than data on planetary geology.

So at first blush it can be a bit of a downer when a HiRISE image looks like this:

mars-young-crater.jpg

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

But hey, this is a science experiment, and this contrasty crater is just busting with science.

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A Crater By Any Other Name

Posted on October 22, 2008 | 1 Comments

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It's been just over two weeks since the MESSENGER spacecraft swooped past Mercury during its second flyby of the innermost planet.

Since the initial fervor, the MESSENGER team has been faithfully releasing images collected during the close encounter, some of which are providing data-hungry scientists with fodder for speculation about Mercury's geologic processes.

Today's offering highlights what I think must be one of the more frustrating aspects of being a planetary explorer: naming stuff.

Where in the universe—other than your local Barnes & Noble—can you find Arabic, Swiss, Ukrainian, and ancient Roman poets sitting next to a Baroque-era French composer being cut in half by one of Captain Cook's ships?

That'd be Mercury's southern side, which is just packed with craters first seen during the original Mariner 10 flybys in 1974 and '75.

mercury-craters.jpg

—Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Now, gone are the days when being the first person to see something and, whenever possible, stick a flag in it grants you the automatic right to bestow upon it a name. In astronomy they's got rules, and the rules for naming things can get pretty specific.

[Thank goodness for this, by the way, or the list of gas giant planets in our solar system might have been Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and George.]

For Mercury, the International Astronomical Union states that all craters must be named for famous dead artists, musicians, or writers. Rupes, or cliffs, are named after famous explorers' ships.

Given these constraints, creating the list of approved crater names on heavily pockmarked Mercury must have really stumped even the most ardent trivia fans.

Consider too that most of these monikers were decided before we'd even gotten to see more than 45 percent of the planet's surface.

In April the IAU added six crater names to Mercury's approved list, and more are sure to come as the onslaught of MESSENGER images gets scrutinized.

Along Came a Spider

Posted on September 23, 2008 | 0 Comments

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As anyone who's recently cleaned their attic can tell you, unexpectedly finding a large spider sitting in a dark, hidden part of your home can elicit excitement, consternation, and sometimes a family squabble.

Apparently it's no different if you are a planetary scientist, even when the home in question is the solar system and the "spider" is a mysterious formation sitting in a crater on Mercury.

In January the MESSENGER spacecraft beamed back images of a side of Mercury no one on Earth had seen before.

The suite of new data from the probe's first flyby of the innermost planet revealed lots of volcanism, asteroid impacts, and an odd feature the team dubbed the spider—a network of more than a hundred raised, narrow troughs radiating outward from a central structure.

mercury-spider.jpg

—courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

The whole formation sits in the middle of the Caloris Basin, a massive 3.8-billion-year-old impact crater that had not been seen in its entirety before the flyby.

Today Sean Solomon, principle investigator for the MESSENGER mission, presented at the 3rd European Planetary Science Congress his theory that the spider is the product of a meteorite impact.

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The moon
From dwarf planets to hot Jupiters, join NatGeo News space and tech editor Victoria Jaggard in a global discussion about all things extraterrestrial.


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