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Results tagged “water” 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.


Moon Crash to Put All Eyes on Cabeus A

Posted on September 11, 2009 | 0 Comments

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On October 9, 2009, a piece of launch rocket still attached to an orbiting spacecraft will finally let go so it can take a dive into the moon.

The event is the end goal of NASA's LCROSS mission, which aims to study material kicked up by the impact to find out whether the lunar surface has water ice.

Today NASA announced that Cabeus A, a 25-mile-wide (40-kilometer-wide) crater on the moon's south pole, will be the site in the mission's crosshairs.

lcross-map.jpg

[LCROSS's Candidate Impact Craters -- That's Cabeus A Marked as "SP C"]
—Picture courtesy NASA/Ames Research Center

Not too much is known about this crater, which is part of the reason it was selected. Cabeus A sits on a region of the moon that's almost always in shadow, making it more likely that any water ice could exist there, since it wouldn't have been effectively vaporized by direct sunlight.

The crater is also among the sites on the moon known to have a mysterious quantity of hydrogen, which your grade-school chemistry teacher would remind you is a major component of good old H2O. Cabeus A in particular has a high concentration of hydrogen clustered in what NASA scientists call a "sweet spot" near its rim.

Finally, Cabeus A rests along an edge of the moon that is easily visible from Earth, making it an ideal place to send up a plume for people to see.

The plume will be bright but short lived, lasting only about 30 seconds before it starts to fade, LCROSS scientist Tony Colaprete said today at a news briefing.

To get the most out of this "flash in the pan," the LCROSS team has coordinated a vast army of stargazers on the ground and in space to watch the event and collect as much information as they can about the plume.

Top of the list will be the LCROSS craft itself, which will be speeding toward the impact site just after it sends the leftover rocket hurtling toward the moon.

Instruments aboard LCROSS will collect data about the plume and the newly minted impact crater until the probe looses contact with Earth about 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) above the lunar surface. Four minutes after the first impact, LCROSS itself will then slam into the moon.

The duty roster also includes massive telescopes in Hawaii and the U.S. Southwest as well as orbiters such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the GeoEye imaging satellite.

In addition, NASA has put out the call for amateur astronomers with backyard telescopes to train their instruments on Cabeus A and report back via a "citizen science" web site.

The data entry page isn't up and running just yet, but if you'd like to take part LCROSS does have a page full of tips for when and where to look, what equipment to use, and how to take pictures.

The impact will happen at 4:30 a.m. Pacific time, which should allow enough darkness for the plume to be visible to people in the Western Hemisphere. Us folks on the East Coast will have our view blocked by dawn skies, but we can watch live streaming video of the moon crash on NASA TV.

For an idea of what you might see, go out and look at the moon tonight, LCROSS experts suggest: The moon is in the same phase right now as it will be on impact day.

As for what we might find, water is the goal but it's not the only option. Hydrogen could also mean the moon's pockets are full of methane, hydrocarbons, or whatever else the body has collected over the last 3.5 billion years, Colaprete noted.

Water or no, the plume's contents, he said, will be "a window into the past of the entire inner solar system."

Mars Volcanoes' Watery Tales

Posted on March 5, 2009 | 0 Comments

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Is it mold on a bathroom wall? A close-up of a Dalmatian? The results of a tragic toner-cartridge accident?

mars-volcano-frost.jpg

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

In fact, it's a Martian volcano in the process of defrosting. The ancient cauldron is part of a group of volcanoes that rings the Hellas impact basin on the red planet's southern hemisphere.

The imaging team with the recently reactivated Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released the picture this week. Taken in January, the shot shows the volcano covered in frost, except for a few dark patches where the icy sheath is starting to melt away.

Researchers aren't sure why the patchy areas are so special, although they suggest that the spots could be dark sand dunes that soak up the sun's heat better than the surrounding soil.

This particular volcano is a patera, a type of volcanic crater where lava once erupted from vents inside the depression. Research has suggested that some of Mars's paterae could be the tops of shield volcanoes—gently sloping peaks like Hawaii's Mauna Loa—that got buried by later lava flows.

Others could have formed when groundwater mixed with magma, triggering an explosion that created the signature scalloped bowl shape.

Today Mars's volcanoes are no longer active, so it's hard to get a clear picture of how they formed. Some of the youngest known lava flows are anywhere from 20 million to 200 million years old.

Olympus Mons, the solar system's biggest volcano, appears to be a shield volcano, but it has an odd asymmetrical shape that geologists can't quite account for.

olympus-mons-photo.jpg

In a new study released this week, geophysicists used a computer model to see how Olympus might have formed.

What they found is that a bed of clay sediments would have been needed to reduce friction as the lava spread out, creating the lopsided shield. And those clays needed water to form.

—Image courtesy NASA

Evidence for water-requiring minerals on Mars is kinda old news at this point. But the new study is making waves because it also offers the tantalizing hint that liquid water—a key ingredient for life—could still be lurking underneath the massive volcano.

"This deep reservoir, warmed by geothermal gradients and magmatic heat and protected from adverse surface conditions, would be a favored environment for the development and maintenance of thermophilic organisms," the study authors conclude in last month's issue of the journal Geology.

In other words, if there's still heat under the mountain's skirts, Martian life could be hiding in its belly.

Active Mars Belches Methane

Posted on January 15, 2009 | 0 Comments

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For a planet at the center of so many discussions about life, Mars can seem like a really dead world.

It's cold, dry, and dusty with a thin atmosphere that doesn't block out much solar radiation. There's minerals and gullies that suggest water flowed there more than three billion years ago, but aside from a few wandering robots, a big landslide, and the occasional planet-wide dust storm, modern Mars doesn't seem to see a lot of action.

Or maybe we just haven't been looking in the right places.

Today a group of university and NASA scientists announced they've found plumes of methane that could be coming from some mysterious underground source on Mars's northern hemisphere.

mars-plumes.jpg

—Image courtesy NASA

Over a three-year span starting in 2003, ground-based observatories saw that the plumes appeared and disappeared, varying with the seasons. At one point Mars spewed out about 19,000 metric tons of methane at nearly 0.6 kilograms a second. Take that, Aussie sheep.

And so comes the big question: Does active methane mean life in motion?

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Let It Snow [on Mars]

Posted on September 29, 2008 | 0 Comments

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NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has seen snow falling on the red planet!

One of the probe's atmospheric instruments detected ice crystals coming from clouds about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers ) above, although the flakes seem to have vaporized before they reached the ground.

080929-mars-snow_big.jpg

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Canadian Space Agency

This probably isn't a huge surprise, as we already knew Mars has glaciers and ice caps that grow and retreat with the seasons, so it was a good bet it still has a hydrological cycle of some sort. Still, way cool to be potentially seeing it in action.

NatGeo News reporter Anne Minard has the full scoop, including other data from Phoenix that bolster Mars's likely history as a wet and wild world.

The news got me to thinking: Which other bodies in our solar system have snowfall?

After a quick roll around teh Internets, it seems the answer depends on how one defines "snow."

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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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