Results tagged “moon”

Seil Collins, reporter
(Image: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)
 
This is the most complete view of the far side of the moon's topography that we have ever had.
 
The mosaic image is made up of 15,000 Wide Angle Camera frames taken between November 2009 and February 2011 by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The frames were collected when the sun was at an angle - low on the moon's horizon - that results in light conditions that favour topographical interpretations.

Images were also captured at varying latitudes and longitudes around the moon, creating a complete picture of its surface, including the far side. Other mosaic images have mapped specific features such as the steepness and roughness of the terrain, important information for surface operations.
 
"All these global maps and other data are available at a very high resolution -- that's what makes this release exciting," said John Keller, the LRO deputy project scientist. "Researchers worldwide are getting the best view of the moon they have ever had."

Cian O'Luanaigh, reporter

This "illumination map" was constructed using over 1700 photographs of the same area of the moon's south pole taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) over a six month period.

Because the moon's rotational axis is tilted by only 1.54 degrees (compared to Earth's 23.5 degrees), some areas near its poles are left in permanent shadow, while nearby regions remain sunlit for most of the year.

Each image taken by the LROC was projected onto a map of the area and converted to a binary image: if the ground was illuminated that pixel of the map was set to one, and if shadowed zero. Researchers then stacked all the binary images and calculated the percentage of the time each pixel was illuminated over the six month period.

The resulting "illumination map" is shown above. Areas that were never illuminated appear black, areas that were always illuminated are white, and areas that were sometimes illuminated and sometimes in shadow appear as varying shades of grey.

The Shackleton crater, 19 kilometres in diameter and 4 kilometres deep, can be seen at the centre of the image. The south pole is at approximately 9 o'clock on its rim.

The LROC is making daily (which is about 28 Earth days) and yearly illumination maps for both poles in preparation for future lunar missions.

Olivier Dessibourg, contributor

(Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

On its journey around Saturn and its moons, the Cassini mission - jointly run by NASA and the European Space Agency - has made another breathtaking discovery. The findings, published in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1198366), show that Rhea, the second biggest moon of the giant planet, has an atmosphere that is 70 per cent oxygen and 30 per cent carbon dioxide. This adds to the picture of Rhea that Cassini has already provided by imaging its craters and discovering its rings.

"This really is the first time that we've seen oxygen directly in the atmosphere of another world", Andrew Coates, from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, told The Guardian. Layers containing oxygen had already been detected around the Jovian moons Europa and Ganymede in the 1990s, but only from a distance using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

This time, Cassini's instrument had the chance to "smell" that oxygen, as it flew through it over Rhea's north pole, just 97 kilometres above the surface, according to the details given on Space.com. This layer - with an oxygen density probably about 5 trillion times less than on Earth - was "too thin to be remotely detected", said Ben Teolis of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

Cian O'Luanaigh, reporter

(Image: SDO/NASA)

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded its first lunar transit when the moon passed directly between the spacecraft and the sun.

In this newly released image, the dark edge of the moon forms a partial eclipse of the sun. This sharp edge can be used to help calculate the effects of light diffraction on the telescope's optics, allowing operators to correct for this effect.

Onboard the SDO is the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument. This measures magnetic fields, as well as visible ripples on the surface of the sun caused by the sun's convection zone. This data helps researchers understand our star's influence on Earth and near-Earth space.

The spacecraft was launched on board Atlas V from Cape Canaveral on the 11th of February 2010.

(Image: AFP/Getty)

Rachel Courtland, reporter

China's second lunar probe, Chang'e 2, took to the skies today. The spacecraft is the next step in China's robotic lunar exploration programme, which ultimately aims to retrieve samples from the moon and return them to Earth.

Chang'e 2 is expected to reach the moon in roughly five days, less than half the time it took its predecessor Chang'e 1 to take the trip when it launched in 2007. Once it reaches lunar orbit, Chang'e 2 will be able to snap pictures of the surface with 10 times the resolution of Chang'e 1. One area of interest is the lava-flooded Bay of Rainbows, China's top destination for its first lunar lander, which could launch in 2013.

Jamie Condliffe, reporter

Over the course of this week, we have done our best to persuade you that becoming an astronaut is almost impossibly difficult and extremely dangerous. But if you are reading this, then you are probably not buying it. Despite all its drawbacks, many people can't wait to get into space - in fact some think it is the best way to secure humanity's future.

So that just leaves one question: where are you going to go?

David Shiga, reporter

A pair of Earth-orbiting satellites designed to study the auroras are making a detour to visit the moon.

The two spacecraft are part of a fleet of five launched into Earth orbit by NASA in 2007 on a mission called THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). They have been studying the space storms that trigger the northern and southern lights, or auroras, on Earth.

But two of the satellites were set to go on death row earlier this year. If they had been left in their original orbits, the solar-powered craft would have made lengthy passages through Earth's shadow in March 2010, fatally draining their batteries, according to a Discovery News story.

To avoid this and to squeeze some more science out of the two spacecraft, the THEMIS team decided to send them farther from Earth and park them in orbit around the moon.

But there was a problem. Getting into orbit around the moon takes a lot of energy, and the two spacecraft simply didn't have enough fuel to get the job done. So the team devised a clever, roundabout way to get there on a shoestring.

"We realized that if we had enough fuel to change their orbits, the moon's gravity would start pulling them up," the mission's chief scientist Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Berkeley, told Discovery News.

The spacecraft were already in elongated orbits that passed close to Earth at one end and looped far into space at the other end. Starting in 2009, the spacecraft used their thrusters to extend the far end of their orbits, setting them up for close encounters with the moon.

The gravitational slingshot effect from these lunar encounters, as well as the probes' close passes near Earth, changed their trajectories drastically – you can see the technical details here (pdf). Their own thrusters should be able to do the rest of the job, putting them in orbit around the moon in 2011. There, they will measure tenuous gas surrounding the moon, called the exosphere, and record the interaction of the solar wind with the moon.

Not bad for two spacecraft that would have been space junk by now without this creative rescue plan.

David Shiga, reporter

Calling all lunarphiles. You can help advance understanding of our neighbour satellite at a new website called Moon Zoo.

The site builds on the success of Galaxy Zoo, which harnesses the collective brainpower of thousands of volunteers to classify galaxies according to their shapes and has led to various discoveries.

The same people behind that project have created the Moon Zoo site, says Scientific American. Visit the site and you can help unlock the mysteries of the solar system by counting craters in images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

(Image: NASA)

This will help scientists unravel the history of asteroid and comet impacts on the moon and calculate the ages of different surfaces there. The moon preserves a better record of ancient impacts than Earth does, since craters quickly erode and disappear on our planet.

Moon Zoo could help lunar researchers understand the origins of a period of intense bombardment early in the solar system's history, prior to about 3.8 billion years ago.

Richard Fisher, deputy news editor

Moon visits are off the table, but NASA's Orion capsule may soon fly after all.

The crew capsule, which had been shelved earlier this year along with the rest of the agency's moon plans, will be used to return astronauts from the International Space Station in an emergency, NASA officials told Associated Press.

NASA's Constellation programme, which included the development of Orion and the Ares I rocket, was cancelled earlier this year. Orion would have carried astronauts to the moon.

Rachel Courtland, reporter

It has been called "radical", "dangerous", "a brave reboot", and "a giant step from greatness to mediocrity". Everyone seems to have an opinion on the White House's new plan for NASA. But one key figure has yet to weigh in on NASA's future – the president himself. That could change next month, when Barack Obama will travel to Florida for a conference on the future of the agency.

Marcus Chown, contributor

The moon was created by a jet of matter that stabbed out of the Earth's interior, where it originated in a runaway uranium fission reactor at the boundary between the core and mantle. Wow! This is the stuff of science-fiction movies. And it has certainly grabbed headlines across the world. But does the amazing idea, promoted in an online paper by Rob de Meijer of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and Wim van Westrenem of VU University Amsterdam, stand up to scrutiny?

Richard Fisher, deputy news editor

It might have been a simple mistake to make, but a fatal error contributed to the premature demise of India's lunar probe Chandrayaan-1. The space agency underestimated temperatures around the moon, so the probe had been overheated for months.

In May, the Indian Space Research Organisation raised the probe's lunar orbit from 100 to 200 kilometres, saying the move would provide a wider view of the lunar surface.

However, engineers had miscalculated the radiant heat from the moon's surface and the shift was actually an attempt to cool the probe down, ISRO's T K Alex admitted to The Times of India: "We assumed that the temperature at 100km above the Moon's surface would be around 75 degrees Celsius. However, it was more than 75 degrees and problems started to surface. We had to raise the orbit to 200km."

The story reports:

It now transpires that heating problems on the craft had begun as early as November 25, 2008, forcing ISRO to deactivate some of the payloads - there were 11 in all.

As a result, some of the experiments could not be carried out which raised questions on whether the pre-launch thermal vacuum test done on the spacecraft at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore was adequate.

Radio contact was lost on 29 August, ending the mission more than a year early.

The communications failure was likely precipitated by the unexpectedly warm temperatures, says Madhavan Nair, chair of the ISRO. According to BombayNews.net, he said the "failure rate of devices increases when the temperature goes up". Heat issues, coupled with space radiation, were the cause of the mission's premature termination, he said.

Henry Spencer, computer programmer, spacecraft engineer and amateur space historian

Last week, the world celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. But two years before that milestone, Congress had already terminated funding for most of NASA's post-Apollo plans. The agency has pretty much been in a holding pattern for the past 40 years. Its recent attempt to break out of it with the Constellation programme of Ares rockets, an Apollo-inspired crew capsule and an Altair lunar lander is in big trouble, both technical and financial. Where do we go from here? Where should we go from here?

Henry Spencer, computer programmer, spacecraft engineer and amateur space historian

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong made the first footsteps on the moon. Was there some reason it was him in particular?

There were two men aboard the Eagle when it landed: Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. Who would make the first footprints on the moon?

After the crew selection was announced, NASA delayed saying anything about who was going to be first out. That fuelled press speculation that it would be Armstrong because he was a civilian – at the time, the US military wasn't highly regarded in many eyes. Indeed it was Armstrong, who has since kept a famously low profile, turning down requests for interviews or speeches on the subject – but not because he was a civilian.

Maggie McKee, space editor

Apollo mania is officially here! The 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is just around the corner, on 20 July, and many websites are marking the occasion with essays, slide shows and videos (see our Apollo special coverage here).

But to relive the mission in real-time, you should check out WeChooseTheMoon.org, a project of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. The site will recreate the Apollo 11 mission minute by minute, beginning on Thursday, 16 July, at 0802 EDT (1202 GMT) – an hour and a half before the mission's launch at 0932 EDT. The demo of the site I've seen is impressive – it's chock-full of photos, videos, cool launch simulations, and audio from mission controllers. You can also sign up to get tweets from the mission in real-time - from Apollo 11 to mission controllers in Houston, from Houston to Apollo 11, and from the lunar module Eagle to the orbiting command module and Houston.

For a more intimate impression of the mission, visit this NASA site, which provides audio of the crew's private conversations while in space. The transcripts of those recordings were made public in the 1970s but the audio has only recently been posted online.

On Thursday, NASA is also releasing refurbished video from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. The release will include 15 important moments from the two-and-a-half hour moonwalk and is part of a larger project to restore footage from the event, which should be finished by the end of the year. (Image: NASA)

Adam Goff, picture editor

Like any big cultural event, the Apollo missions sent ripples across society that left their mark in the form of rock and pop songs: some good, some (really) bad. To celebrate the Apollo mission's 40th anniversary, New Scientist has compiled a top 10 of these creations - all inspired specifically by Apollo and the moon landings.

We tried to avoid general references to the moon or spacemen, so the likes of Sinatra, Elton and Bowie didn't make the cut. But let us know in the comments below if you'd argue for any other favourites for entry onto the lunar play list.

So, in no particular order...

Rachel Courtland, online reporter

A rap video starring Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin is now online, after a hint it might be coming in a New York Times interview published last week. The song is Rocket Experience, and it's quite entertaining. But the biggest treat is the spoof behind-the-scenes video with rap luminaries Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli.

The video, embedded below, reveals the space geek story behind the hip hop collaboration Black Star and an abiding rivalry between "Earth walkers" and "moon walkers".

"I have only two passions: space exploration and hip hop," Aldrin says.

Maggie McKee, space editor

A traffic jam at Florida's launch pads is causing a back-up that literally stretches all the way to the moon.

On Wednesday, two NASA spacecraft – the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite – were supposed to blast off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on their respective missions to map out and crash into the moon. But now, their launch has been postponed until Thursday to give the space shuttle Endeavour a chance to lift off on a mission to bring an experiment platform to the International Space Station.

Richard Fisher, deputy news editor

If you've ever hoped lunar astronauts might actually bust into Michael Jackson's moonwalk, your prayers have been answered.

Things have felt awfully serious at NASA in recent weeks, so the space agency's latest effort at outreach and education brings some welcome light relief.

NASA's "Space Your Face" application allows you to upload a portrait photo into an astronaut helmet, and then watch as your avatar throws down some moves to funky tunes on Mars or the moon.

As someone whose best dance move is something akin to the "hot potato", I felt I was able live my dream via my talented astronaut alter-ego.