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APOLLO'S LUNAR IMAGES GO DIGITAL

Nearly 40 years after man first walked on the Moon, the complete
photographic record from the Apollo project will be accessible both to
researchers and the general public online. Created from the original
flight films, the archive will includes photos taken from lunar orbit
as well as from the surface. The reason that the original Apollo
images have been so seldom accessed is that they are literally
irreplaceable. Between 1968 and 1972, NASA made sets of duplicate
images after each Moon mission came back to Earth, placing the
duplicate sets in various scientific libraries and research facilities
around the world. It is those copies (and subsequent copies of them)
that scientists and the public have seen; inevitably, they are not as
good as the originals, which have remained in deep-freeze storage at
the Johnson Space Center.

The Apollo digitising project has scanned the original flight films
with high resolution in both linear terms (5-micron pixels, fine
enough to show the photographic grain) and in intensity (14-bit,
giving 16,000 shades of grey). The most detailed images from lunar
orbit show rocks and other surface features about 1 metre across. The
project will take about three years to complete and will scan some
36,000 images. They include about 600 35-mm frames, roughly 20,000
Hasselblad 60-mm frames (colour and monochrome), more than 10,000
mapping-camera frames, and about 4,600 panoramic-camera frames.

from SPA email newsletter

MARS ROVERS BRAVING SEVERE DUST STORMS

Having explored Mars for three-and-a-half years on missions originally
designed for three months, the Mars rovers are facing another
challenge in the form of summer dust storms, which for over a month
have affected the rover Opportunity and, to a lesser extent, its
companion, Spirit. However, so far the rovers are showing robust
survival characteristics. The dust over Opportunity has blocked 99%
of direct sunlight, leaving only the limited diffuse sky light to
power it. If the sunlight is further cut back for an extended period,
the rovers will not be able to generate enough power to keep
themselves warm or to operate at all, even in a near-dormant state;
they use electric heaters to keep some of their vital core electronics
warm. Engineers are taking measures to protect them, especially
Opportunity. Spirit, in a location where the dust is currently less
severe, has been instructed to conserve battery power by limiting its
activities.

from SPA email newsletter

Astronomers Find Farthest Known Galaxies

Astronomers have found evidence for the most distant galaxies ever detected.
The galaxies are seen as they existed just 500 million years after the birth of the universe. Their light, traversing the cosmos for more than 13 billion years, was seen only because it was distorted in a natural "gravitational lens" created by the gravity-bending mass of a nearer cluster of galaxies.
"Gravitational lensing is the magnification of distant sources by foreground structures," explained Caltech astronomer Richard Ellis, who led the international team. "By looking through carefully selected clusters, we have located six star-forming galaxies seen at unprecedented distances, corresponding to a time when the universe was only 500 million years old, or less than 4 percent of its present age."
The universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old, so that puts the newfound galaxies at 13.2 billion light-years away. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
The team found the galaxies using the 10-meter Keck II telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The finding will be presented tomorrow at a conference of the Geological Society in London.
The light from the half-dozen faraway star-forming galaxies was boosted about 20 times by the magnifying effect of the foreground galaxy cluster, said team member Dan Stark, a Caltech graduate student.
Gravitational lensing is tricky, the researchers admit. To bolster their case, they point to very ancient galaxies that are just slightly closer, yet which already contain old stars.
"To produce these old stars requires significant earlier activity, most likely in the fainter star-forming galaxies we have now seen," Stark said.
In 2004, a separate team claimed discovery of a galaxy 13.23 billion light-years away, "but re-examination of that object by others showed it to be spurious," Stark said.
The galaxies offer a glimpse of an era shortly after the first stars formed.
After the theoretical Big Bang, there were no stars. Eventually, a thick "fog" was effectively burned off by hot, young stars, ending what's called the cosmic Dark Ages.
"That we should find so many distant galaxies in our small survey area suggests they are very numerous indeed," Stark said. "We estimate the combined radiation output of this population could be sufficient to break apart (ionize) the hydrogen atoms in space at that time, thereby ending the Dark Ages."

by Robert Roy Britt on Space.com

Gamma Ray Observatory Will Launch in December

NASA has Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra to cover visible, ultraviolet, infrared and X-ray portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The next wavelength to get its own space telescope is gamma rays. When NASA's Gamma ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST) launches in December, there will be a powerful new observatory in space, capturing more gamma rays than any space observatory to date.

GLAST is currently living in a "clean room" at General Dynamics in Arizon. This is a special enclosed environment with very low levels of contaminants or environmental pollutants. It will remain in this clean room until it's transfered to the launch pad later this year.

When GLAST finally makes it into orbit, it'll be the most powerful and sensitive gamma ray observatory ever launched, gathering photons that can contain hundreds of billions of times more energy than we perceive with our eyes. These gamma rays are generated in the most extreme events in the Universe, such as the disks of gas swirling around black holes.

Unlike the other space-based observatories, GLAST doesn't have a mirror to focus the photons; gamma rays don't work that way. Instead, it's got a large detector capable of detecting any gamma rays in 20% of the sky. It'll orbit the Earth every 95 minutes, and image most of the sky 16 times a day. It can also be directed to stare in a specific direction to image an event, such as the afterglow from a gamma ray burst.

from universetoday email newsletter - info@universetoday.com

Crater could solve 1908 Tunguska Meteor Mystery

In late June of 1908, a fireball exploded above the remote Russian forests of Tunguska, Siberia, flattening more than 800 square miles of trees. Researchers think a meteor was responsible for the devastation, but neither its fragments nor any impact craters have been discovered.
Astronomers have been left to guess whether the object was an asteroid or a comet, and figuring out what it was would allow better modeling of potential future calamities.
Italian researchers now think they've found a smoking gun: The 164-foot-deep Lake Cheko, located just 5 miles northwest of the epicenter of destruction.
"When we looked at the bottom of the lake, we measured seismic waves reflecting off of something," said Giuseppe Longo, a physicist at the University of Bologna in Italy and co-author of the study. "Nobody has found this before. We can only explain that and the shape of the lake as a low-velocity impact crater."
Should the team turn up conclusive evidence of an asteroid or comet on a later expedition, when they obtain a deeper core sample beneath the lake, remaining mysteries surrounding the Tunguska event may be solved.
The findings are detailed in this month's online version of the journal Terra Nova.


read the rest of this story at
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070626_st_tunguska_crater.html

Most Distant Black Hole Discovered

An international team of astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole at the very edge of the observable Universe, located 13 billion light-years away. Since the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, we're seeing this object when the Universe was only 700 million years old.
Active galactic nuclei, or quasars, occur when a supermassive black hole is feasting on infalling material. Material piles up faster than the black hole can feed, and it starts to glow so brightly that astronomers can see it clear across the Universe. This object, CFHQS J2329-0301, was discovered as part of a new distant quasar survey performed with the MegaCam imager on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
The black hole powering the quasar is thought to have 500 million times the mass of the Sun - that makes it hungry and bright. And because the quasar is so bright, astronomers can use it as a background object to examine the gas in front. And with follow up observations, they can get more details about what kind of galaxy it formed inside.
Original Source: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope News Release

Mars Garden Wins at a Flower Show

A garden designed to simulate a future habitation on Mars won a Gold Medal at the Chelsea Flower Show, operated by the UK's Royal Horticultural Society. Finally, space exploration is getting a little respect.
The exhibit is called "600 Days with Bradstone", and it's a simulated garden that Martian astronauts might construct to help them cope with a long journey on the Red Planet. The designer consulted with the European Space Agency to understand the physical constraints for a domed garden on Mars. Rocks were quarried from Scotland that look realistically like Martian rocks.
After a hard day's work on the dusty surface of Mars, astronauts could enjoy a lush green garden, surrounded by plants with multiple beneficial properties, like coffee, olives, wheat and calendula. The garden also includes familiar plants that help remind the astronauts of their home.
ESA believes that future missions to Mars will require regenerative systems that can adapt and evolve over time, instead of traditional life support systems which can't operate at peak efficiency for the long durations required for a Mars mission.

Original Source: ESA News Release

This note from Universe Today email newsletter

CLIMATE CHANGE ON MARS

Scientists from NASA say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. That is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period, but since there is no known life on Mars it suggests that rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena. The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth.
The scientists compared heat maps of the Martian surface from the Viking mission in the 1970s with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found that there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker. The darkening is believed to occur through the action of wind in sweeping rock surfaces clear of dust. When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, and the system has positive feedback, the heat driving up the mean wind speed. It is speculated that eventually the winds become strong enough to trigger a global dust storm, such as has repeatedly been seen on Mars in the past; the storms return relatively light-coloured dust to the areas previously swept clear, and the cycle begins anew.

Nature - from Society for Popular Astronomy Email Newsletter

MERCURY HAS MOLTEN CORE

NRAO
Scientists have found that Mercury probably has a molten core. Mercury is one of the least-understood of the planets in our Solar System. Its distance from the Sun is just over one-third that of the Earth, and it has a mass only 5.5% of the Earth's. Only about half of Mercury's surface has been photographed by a spacecraft, Mariner 10, in 1974. Mariner 10 also discovered that Mercury has a weak magnetic field, about 1% as strong as the Earth's. That discovery spurred a scientific debate about the planet's core. Planetary magnetic fields are usually thought to be caused by an electromagnetic dynamo in a molten core. However, Mercury is so small that most scientists expected its core to have cooled and solidified long ago. Those scientists speculated that the magnetic field seen today may have been frozen into the planet when the core cooled.
Whether the core is molten or solid today depends greatly on its chemical composition, which can provide important clues about the processes involved in planet formation. To answer the question, the scientists used a radar technique to measure, with an unprecedented precision of one part in 100,000, the rate at which Mercury spins on its axis. Tiny variations in its spin rate, caused by solar gravitational effects, were calculated to be twice as large if the core were liquid than they would be if Mercury had a solid core. The measured variations are best represented by a core that is at least partially molten.

NRAO - from Society for Popular Astronomy Email Newsletter