First Monkey to Ever Walk on the Moon Declared Dead
The History Bluff (motto: "Making a mess of history") brings us another headscratcher with the sad news that the first monkey to ever walk on the moon has passed away.
On June 3, 1981 Harlan the Monkey became the first primate to ever walk on the moon. Harlan died on November 18, 2009 of an apparent Tang overdose.
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NASA Confirms "Significant" Water on Moon
So. Yesterday, we heard that the Pope’s astronomer conceded that there may be alien life outside of planet Earth, and today NASA said that it discovered significant water on the Moon.
"The discovery opens a new chapter in our understanding of the moon," the space agency said in a written statement shortly after the briefing began.
Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said the latest discovery also could unlock the mysteries of the solar system.
He listed several options as sources for the water, including solar winds, comets, giant molecular clouds or even the moon itself through some kind of internal activity. The Earth also may have a role, Wargo said.
"If the water that was formed or deposited is billions of years old, these polar cold traps could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system, much as an ice core sample taken on Earth reveals ancient data," NASA said in its statement.
Coicidence? I smell a conspiracy. Where’s my tin foil hat? Next stop: microbes on Mars! Link
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Entrance Found to Underground Lunar Tunnel
It has long been suspected that there are underground tunnels and caverns on the moon, presumably the residua of lava tubes. Now a group of scientists led by Junichi Haruyama of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency are reporting the discovery of a “skylight” leading into an underground cavern.
The hole measures 65 metres across, and based on images taken at a variety of sun angles, the hole is thought to extend down at least 80 metres. It sits in the middle of a rille, suggesting the hole leads into a lava tube as wide as 370 metres across… Since the tubes may be hundreds of metres wide, they could provide plenty of space for an underground lunar outpost. The tubes’ ceilings could protect astronauts from space radiation, meteoroid impacts and wild temperature fluctuations…
This is reminiscent of the “doorway” found on Mars several years ago, but this discovery seems to be more clearly defined. More details at New Scientist, via NAACAL.
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NASA Unveils Moon Rocket
Next generation space travel is closer to reality with the Ares 1-X rocket making its debut this week. The Constellation Program’s centerpiece is supposed to be the rocket that launches Orion, the ship that will take astronauts back to the moon, but that dream may be fading away.
Nasa officials plan to go ahead with the Ares 1-X test flight even as Barack Obama’s administration considers plans to shelve the Constellation programme through lack of funding.
A detailed review of Nasa’s future programmes recently delivered to the White House raised concerns that the space agency does not have deep enough pockets to fulfil its vision for a return to the moon. The review said the agency may have to abandon the Ares rockets and switch to a cheaper design. (Photo: NASA).
Here’s a rendering of an Ares launch.
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Water Found on the Moon
As they say, the third time is the charm. Three different missions to the moon have relayed back evidence of water. There were traces of water in the moon rocks brought back by Apollo, but that was attributed to contamination. Three more recent examinations have found evidence of water: India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe detected water by mapping wavelengths of light from the moon’s surface, the Cassini probe found evidence of global distribution of the water signal, and the Deep Impact spacecraft found evidence by infrared detection.
“The Deep Impact observations of the Moon not only unequivocally confirm the presence of [water/hydroxyl] on the lunar surface, but also reveal that the entire lunar surface is hydrated during at least some portion of the lunar day,” the authors wrote in their study.
The findings of all three spacecraft “provide unambiguous evidence for the presence of hydroxyl or water,” said Paul Lucey of the University of Hawaii in an opinion essay accompanying the three studies. Lucey was not involved in any of the missions.
The new data “prompt a critical reexamination of the notion that the moon is dry. It is not,” Lucey wrote.
The amount of water on the moon is miniscule by Earth standards, with one ton of lunar surface holding about 32 ounces. Link -via Digg
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Jupiter's Temporary Moons
Sarah Zielinski writes in The Smithsonian that Jupiter, as the largest planet in our solar system, occasionally pulls comets into its orbit. Sometimes, as with comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 (pictured), Jupiter’s gravity will even pull a comet into a direct impact. Zielinsky writes:
Astronomers from Japan and Northern Ireland, presenting their findings today at the European Planetary Science Congress, used observations of Comet Kushida-Muramatsu—from when it was discovered in 1993 and when it returned in 2001—to calculate the comet’s path over the previous century. They determined that the comet became a temporary moon when it entered Jupiter’s neighborhood in 1949. It made two full, if irregular, orbits around the planet, and then continued its travels into the inner solar system in 1962.
The researchers also predict that Comet 111P/Helin-Roman-Crockett, which circled Jupiter between 1967 and 1985, will again become a temporary moon and complete six loops around the planet between 2068 and 2086.
“The results of our study suggests that impacts on Jupiter and temporary satellite capture events may happen more frequently than we previously expected,” David Asher of Northern Ireland’s Armagh Observatory told the AFP.
Photo: NASA
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Venus, Jupiter and The Moon
Vincent Miu took Runner-Up in the 2009 Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest, Earth & Space category, with this entry.
I imagine it’s a long exposure shot grafted onto a single shot, but I’m not sure. Anyone know how he achieved this beautiful result?
Link | Link to the Grand Winner
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Map of the First Moonwalk Superimposed on a Baseball Diamond
NASA has created a map of Aldrin and Armstrong’s journeys on the surface of the moon to the scale of a baseball diamond. It helps put their activities at the landing site in perspective. Also, we know “Who’s on first?” It was Buzz Aldrin.
Link via Popular Science
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Company Offers to Carve Advertisements on the Surface of the Moon
(YouTube Link)
This start-up proposes to use robots to carve the lunar surface dust into patterns that could serve as advertisements. I’m skeptical due to the sheer scale of the task — the number of robots necessary over a very long period of time. Still, people said that we’d never have bacon flavored vodka, but scientists and engineers overcame the obstacles. Anyway, we know from an episode of The Tick that it can be done.
Link via Popular Science
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New Pictures of Apollo Landing Sites
Forty years later, you can still see the lunar modules, and even footprints, left on the moon by the Apollo missions. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO took new pictures between July 11th and 15th.
“Not only do these images reveal the great accomplishments of Apollo, they also show us that lunar exploration continues,” said LRO project scientist Richard Vondrak of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “They demonstrate how LRO will be used to identify the best destinations for the next journeys to the moon.”
NASA officials say the next round of photographs, to be taken during the final mapping orbit, will have even greater resolution. Link -via Bad Astronomy Blog, where these pictures caused great excitement.
(image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University)
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Reflections in a Sliver of the Moon
A rock named Blue Genesis was brought back from the moon by Apollo 16, the final moon mission, in 1972. Moon rocks remain rare and precious for that a single reason – because we never went back for more.
The astronauts brought it and 200 pounds of other rocks back to Earth as the bounty from Apollo 16. At the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, scientists ascertained that Blue Genesis, as it was once called, weighed 12 pounds, and they cut it to pieces to send out for study. Geologists estimate that it could be 4.23 billion years old.
Since 1981, a sliver of that rock has resided like a wedge of old cheese — a light gray speckled filling inside a dark rind — at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.
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Ten Things You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Moon Landing
Craig Nelson offers ten lesser-known facts about the first human moon landing:
6. The “one small step for man” wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface.
7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle’s door because there was no outer handle.
8. The toughest moonwalk task? Planting the flag. NASA’s studies suggested that the lunar soil was soft, but Armstrong and Aldrin found the surface to be a thin wisp of dust over hard rock. They managed to drive the flagpole a few inches into the ground and film it for broadcast, and then took care not to accidentally knock it over.
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Russians Tried to Beat Apollo 11 in the Race to the Moon by Crash Landing a Spacecraft
A newly released recording from a British control room monitoring lunar activity in the late 1960s revealed that the Russian actually tried to beat the Americans in the race to the Moon: just hours before the Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, a Russian spacecraft Luna-15 crash-landed there:
Sir Bernard Lovell, the astronomer, was among the team listening to transmissions coming from the area of space and began tracking the unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 15, which was trying to collect samples of lunar soil and rock and then return to Earth before the US mission.
The recordings from Jodrell’s Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them, show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21 – just a few hours before the Americans lifted off. [...]
People in Jodrell’s control room can then be heard shouting "it’s landing" and "it’s going down much too fast" as they track Luna 15’s final moments before it crashes.
A voice is later heard saying: "I say, this has really been drama of the highest order."
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Rigging Apollo 11 on the Moon
The more we find out about the Apollo moon missions, the more we find they were operating closer to the edge than anyone outside of NASA knew. In an excerpt from Buzz Aldrin’s new book, “Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon”, he tells about a crucial circuit breaker he and Neil Armstrong found broken on the floor of the moon lander. Aldrin rigged the circuit by inserting a felt-tip pen, and hoped it would work during their liftoff.
The liftoff from the moon was intrinsically a tense time . The ascent stage simply had to work. The engines had to fire, propelling us upward, leaving the descent stage of the LM still sitting on the moon. We had no margin for error, no second chances, no rescue plans if the liftoff failed. There would be no way for Mike up in Columbia to retrieve us. We had no provision for another team to race from Earth to pick us up if the Eagle did not soar. Nor did we have food, water, or oxygen for more than a few hours.
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Moon Reach Ladder by Mike Mak
"Reach for the moon" is easier said than done, so when you hear someone utter this oft-overused phrase, kindly point them out to this ladder by Hong Kong Designer Mike Mak. The "Moon Reach Ladder" inspired by 
, the Chinese character for moon.
Link (under projects > Moon reach ladder) – via CreativeRoots
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Lunar Leftovers: How the Moon Became a Trash Can
We normally associate space itself as being littered with the detritus of our nascent attempts at interstellar travel. The moon, however, is chock full of the remains of our various attempts to explore it. So, what exactly is up there? Moreover, does any of the stuff on the moon still work or is it just one giant cosmic trash can?
If HG Wells and others were correct and there were civilizations on the moon then they would have expelled a communal gasp of horror in 1959 when the first piece of man made technology hit the moon dust. Looking now like some steam punk version of what we regularly send spinning in to space, Luna 2 was launched by the Soviets when the Cold War was at its height. The collision with the moon at least proved on thing – that our nearest neighbor in space has no appreciable magnetic field. To add insult to injury, half an hour after Luna 2 hit the moon, so did the third stage of its rocket.
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Earthrise 1966
The first photograph of Earthrise was taken in 1966 by NASA’s robotic probe Lunar Orbiter 1. After the Apollo manned lunar missions brought back better pictures, the original image and other priceless photographs stored on 2-inch tape were dumped into storage and forgotten. In the 70s, NASA hired Nancy Evans to look after their archives. Evans was appalled that a lot of the space agency’s original data was regularly dumped to save on storage costs.
When the clerk came in to ask about the Lunar Orbiter tapes, she didn’t hesitate.
“Do not destroy those tapes,” Evans commanded.
She talked her bosses at JPL into storing them in a lab warehouse. “I could not morally get rid of this stuff,” said Evans, 71, in an interview at her Sun Valley home.
She had no idea what she was letting herself in for. The full collection of Lunar Orbiter data amounted to 2,500 tapes. Assembled on pallets, they constituted an imposing monolith 10 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6 feet high.
The mountain of tapes was just part of Evans’ new burden.
There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton.
The L.A. Times has the story of how Evans fought bureaucracy and outmoded technology for 30 years to preserve the 1966 pictures. Link -via Metafilter
Also see a post with photographs that follow the story of the recovery. Link
(image credit: NASA)
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Saturn's Newest Moon
Surprise! Astronomers analyzing images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have found that Saturn has yet another moon in one of its outermost rings:
A faint pinprick of light embedded in one of Saturn’s outermost rings is now the 61st moon known to be circling the giant planet, astronomers announced today. [...]
Based on its brightness, astronomers estimate that the as-yet-unnamed moon is a third of a mile (half a kilometer) wide. This is tiny as far as moons go, but the object is likely the largest in its neighborhood.
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Christmas Eve Greetings From Space
Back on December 24, 1968 the crew of the Apollo 8 space mission were to make history for two things. They were the first human beings to circle another celestial body in space and they were also to take one of the most iconic pictures of the Earth rising behind the Moon on Christmas Eve which can be seen here on the post Alex had put up: The First Earthrise. Here you’ll hear them wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and Peace to everyone.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and any other holidays out there! Have a Happy New Year! 
via – Wired
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The First Earthrise
For the first time forty years ago yesterday, humans saw their first Earthrise. BBC has the story:
… on Christmas Eve 1968, none of the astronauts on board Apollo 8 were ready for the opportunity to witness their own Earthrise.
In all the months of training and preparation which had preceded the mission, no-one had thought to schedule an attempt for the crew to glimpse and record the most moving of sights, as their jewel of a home planet, suspended in the blackness of space, rose from behind the barren lunar horizon.
… as Apollo 8 nosed its way back from the far side of the Moon for the fourth time, it was Frank Borman who first spotted the view by chance from a window, his reaction captured by the on board tape recorder.
"Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there!" he exclaimed. "Isn’t that something…"
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Smiley Sky Over Australia
If you live in Australia, then you’ve probably already know this: tonight, a cosmic alignment of the planets and the moon will result in a smiley sky!
From soon after 8pm until just before 11pm the planets Venus and Jupiter will stare down from the western sky like two brilliant eyes. Directly below, the crescent moon will form a happy mouth.
"I think it will be very spectacular," Sydney Observatory’s astronomer, Nick Lomb, said. "The three brightest objects in the night sky will all be in the same patch of the sky."
As the night draws on, Dr Lomb predicted, "the smiley face" – with Venus playing the left eye and giant Jupiter the right – "will improve and become a little more compact".
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