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Photo: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera captured a boulder on the Moon that decided to go on a little journey. Looking at the track, you'd think that this happened recently. Well, in geologic times perhaps:
The lonely journey of this large boulder is apparent from its track in a sloping regolith surface. A casual glance might suggest that it happened last week, or even that its rolling might resume at any moment. However, closer inspection will detect a few craters that clearly superpose and therefore post-date the track, showing that this 9-meter diameter boulder stopped rolling some time ago. Impacts are used in this way to provide a relative sense for the timing of events on planetary surfaces across the solar system. The procedure assumes a steady flux of impacting bodies in each size range, with smaller impacts being much more frequent than large impacts.
Though long ago to humans, however, this boulder's journey was made in geologically recent times. Studies suggest that regolith development from micrometeorite impacts will erase tracks like these over time intervals of tens of millions of years. If rate estimates are accurate, this boulder track might not be older than 50-100 million years. Eventually its track will be erased completely.
That's how a lunar rock roll, dudes: Link
One of NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) lunar spacecraft has finally captured the far side (or the dark side, if you're poetically inclined) of the Moon on video. So far, no Cybertronian spacecraft was found.
In the video, the north pole of the moon is visible at the top of the screen as the spacecraft flies toward the lunar south pole. One of the first prominent geological features seen on the lower third of the moon is the Mare Orientale, a 560-mile-wide (900 kilometer) impact basin that straddles both the moon's near and far side.
The clip ends with rugged terrain just short of the lunar south pole. To the left of center, near the bottom of the screen, is the 93-mile-wide (149 kilometer) Drygalski crater with a distinctive star-shaped formation in the middle. The formation is a central peak, created many billions of years ago by a comet or asteroid impact.
What’s more awesome than move special effects? The real thing! This footage of Earthrise over the moon was taken from the Apollo X mission in 1969. All it needed was the proper soundtrack. -via Boing Boing
If the day after Christmas strikes you as a letdown, make a note to yourself now to get outside on Monday evening. NASA tells us there’s going to be a conjunction of heavenly bodies.
The action begins shortly before sunset. Around 4:30 pm to 5:00 pm local time, just as the sky is assuming its evening hue, Venus will pop into view, glistening bright in the deepening twilight. No more than 6 degrees to the right lies the crescent Moon, exquisitely slender, grinning like the Cheshire cat with his head cocked at humorous attention. This is a wonderful time to look; there are very few sights in the heavens as splendid as Venus and the Moon gathered close and surrounded by twilight blue.
But don’t go inside yet, because the view is about to improve. As the sky fades to black, a ghostly image of the full Moon materializes within the horns of the lunar crescent. This is caused by Earthshine, a delicate veil of sunlight reflected from our own blue planet onto the dusty-dark lunar terrain. Also known as “the Da Vinci glow,” after Leonardo da Vinci who first understood it 500 years ago, Earthshine pushes the beauty of the conjunction over the top.
Meanwhile, Jupiter will be looking down on it all from a perch overhead in the constellation Pisces. In ascending order, Jupiter, Venus and the Moon are the three brightest objects in the night sky, able to pierce city lights and even thin clouds. Almost everyone, everywhere will be able to see them.
(Image credit: Flickr user ozgurmulazimoglu)
The most detailed moon map yet has been constructed from images by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Technicians from Arizona State University compiled the map which shows elevation changes as small as 100 meters.
The near-global topographic map was constructed from 69,000 WAC stereo models and covers the latitude range 79°S to 79°N, 98.2% of the entire lunar surface. Due to persistent shadows near the poles it is not possible to create a complete stereo based map at the highest latitudes. However, another instrument onboard LRO called LOLA excels at mapping topography at the poles. Since LOLA ranges to the surface with its own lasers, and the LRO orbits converge at the poles, a very high resolution topographic model is possible, and can be used to fill in the WAC “hole at the pole.” The WAC topography was produced by LROC team members at the German Aerospace Center.
Read more about the map at NASA. Link -via Laughing Squid
Image: NASA/JPL-CalTech/Space Science Institute
Look closely at the photo above and you can pick out 5 of Saturn's 60 natural satellites (Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas, and Rhea) as well as the planet's iconic rings:
A quintet of Saturn's moons come together in the Cassini spacecraft's field of view for this portrait.
Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is on the far left. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F ring near the middle of the image. Brightly reflective Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across) appears above the center of the image. Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across), is bisected by the right edge of the image. The smaller moon Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) can be seen beyond Rhea also on the right side of the image.
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. Rhea is closest to Cassini here. The rings are beyond Rhea and Mimas. Enceladus is beyond the rings.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Rhea and 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Enceladus. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Rhea and 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Enceladus.
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Astronauts get hungry too, and they can't all eat Astronaut Ice Cream Sandwich and drink Tang all the time. Thankfully, there's Domino's Pizza newest planned expansion:
The company’s Japanese arm has launched a website dedicated to its “Moon Branch Project.” It’s all a joke (we think) to celebrate the company’s 25th anniversary in the Asian country.
But for fun and games, it’s remarkably detailed. There’s Scott K. Oelkers, Domino’s president in Japan, dressed in an astronaut suit declaring in a goofy video that the moon location will be a “giant leap for all of mankind” for his “fellow Earthlings.”
There’s a detailed cost breakdown –- development will cost $21.7 billion total, with about $.73 billion going toward rocket-based transport of building materials. A mock-up of the pizza joint features images of a playroom, training gym and plantation.
Link | The Moon Branch Project website [Flash, you can skip the opening monologue]
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NASA has just released new images of the Apollo landing sites on the Moon (or Burbank sound studio, to all you conspiracy theorists):
The twists and turns of the last tracks left by humans on the moon crisscross the surface in this LRO image of the Apollo 17 site. In the thin lunar soil, the trails made by astronauts on foot can be easily distinguished from the dual tracks left by the lunar roving vehicle, or LRV. Also seen in this image are the descent stage of the Challenger lunar module and the LRV, parked to the east.
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French artist Laurent Laveder has shared a couple dozen beautiful images of the moon used as a prop. His other night- and sky-themed works include 3D starscapes, which can be found in his PixHeaven gallery.
Link, PixHeaven Gallery via Mighty Optical Illusions
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Could the moon be 60 million years younger then scientists currently think? New research on moon rocks could lead to rethinking on how the moon was formed.
A new analysis conducted on lunar rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo 16 astronauts has led researchers to believe that the moon may be 60 million years younger than previously thought. This would make the current prevailing theory about how the moon formed impossible. The new results date the moon at around 4.36 billion years old, which means that the moon formed around the same time as the oldest crusts on Earth (4.4 billion year old zircons from Australia.)
This five-foot diameter mattress is from Korean designers Lily Suh and Zoono of i3lab. The image of the moon is by astrophotographer Chin Wei Loon. There’s also a glow-in-the-dark pillow to go with it. Link -via Laughing Squid
Comments Off Do you dream of snuggling up at night with a heavenly body? Well, now you can with the Celestial Buddies from the NeatoShop. These fantastic plush toys are designed to look like the sun, earth, moon, and mars.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more loveable Plush Toys.
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Did the Earth once have two moons? That is what two astronomers are proposing in order to explain some features of our current lonely moon. How do you think human life would have been different if we had looked up all these eons to see two moons?
The idea, cooked up by astronomers Martin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug, of the University of California at Santa Cruz, started out as an attempt to explain why our moon has so asymmetrical a surface. The part that faces us is relatively smooth, with vast expanses of ancient lava forming flat, dark, low-lying plains that earlier astronomers mistook for oceans. But when space probes first circled the moon in the early 1960s, scientists learned that the far side is mostly covered with rugged mountains and craters.
The following is reprinted from the book Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.
For nearly twenty years after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July 1969, the Soviet Union categorically denied having a manned lunar program of its own. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that we began to learn just how close they came to beating the United States to the moon.
HEARING IS BELIEVING
Not too long after 9:00 PM on the evening of April 11, 1961, a United States government listening post off Alaska picked up the sound of human voices speaking in Russian. That wasn’t unusual; in the early 1960s, the Cold War was at its height, and the listening post had been set up for the purpose of intercepting Soviet communications.
But as the analysts studied the transmission, they realized that one of the voices was coming from space -low-Earth orbit to be exact- and the other voices were transmitting from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan, headquarters of the USSR’s space program. As the entire world would learn in a few hours, the 27-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had just become the first human being to fly in space. As was typical with the Soviet space program, the launch had been kept a secret. The signals from space were probably the first inkling the United States had that it had been beaten in the space race once again.
SECOND PLACE
Gagarin had blasted off at 9:07 AM Moscow time on the morning of April 12th (Moscow was 12 hours ahead of Alaska). He made just one orbit around the Earth before landing back on Soviet soil at 10:55 AM. That’s not much of a space flight by modern standards, but in 1961 it stunned the world. Just as it had when it launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, in October 1957, the Soviet Union had demonstrated that it, not the United States, was leading the way into space. The United States wouldn’t be able to send an American astronaut, John Glenn, into orbit until February 1962.
JFK’s QUERY
No one felt the sting of second place more than president John F. Kennedy. “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?” the president asked in a memo to his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. “Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?”
JFK dispatched Johnson to NASA to get an answer. Wernher von Braun, head of rocket development, suggested that America had a chance of beating the Soviets in a flight around the Moon, but that it had an even bigger chance at being the first country to land a man on the Moon’s surface. JFK weighed the options, and on May 25, 1961, made his famous speech committing the United States to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.
NO CONTEST?
On July 20, 1969, the United States won the race to the Moon when astronaut Neil A. Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on lunar soil. But had the Soviets contemplated trying to beat the United States to the Moon? For more than two decades after the Moon landing, the official answer was a definitive, categorical “Nyet!” The Soviets claimed they skipped the Moon race in favor of the more practical challenge of putting a space station into Earth’s orbit. And they succeeded- between 1971 and 1986, they launched seven different space stations into orbit.
The Soviets stuck to their we-didn’t-shoot-for-the-Moon story until August 18, 1989, when the government’s official newspaper, Izvestiya, admitted that the USSR had indeed tried to send a cosmonaut to the Moon, in what was one of the most closely guarded secret programs of the Cold War. They had actually come pretty close to succeeding: Were it not for one large technical challenge that proved insurmountable, the Soviet Union might well have won the race.
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Our ideas about the Moon — what it’s made of and how it got there, and even how we can use its energy — have changed rapidly over the last half-century. You know, since we started sending people there. The newest confirmed findings from lunar rocks reveals that our nearest neighbor is wetter then we thought.
Mind you, we’re not talking about potential geysers or subsurface lakes here; the amount of water we’re seeing here means you’d need to grind up a couple of cubic meters of this glass just to get enough water to drink with lunch. So what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that now we’re even less certain how the Moon formed. The presence of water in subsurface lunar rocks messes with the Giant Impact Hypothesis, the leading theory on the topic to date. Read more at Bad Astronomy.
Link | Image: Sunday Mercury
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A lot of people are trying to be more green these days by installing solar panels on the roofs of their homes and businesses. However the ultimate solar panel installation may be on the moon.
Shimizu Corporation construction firm’s research branch, CSP, unveiled a long-term planning project to install a belt of photovoltaic panels across the surface of the Moon. Power gathered from the 13,000 terawatts of continuous solar energy the Moon’s surface receives daily would be beamed back to an Earth-based receiving station via microwave or laser transmission, where it would then be used to power public offices, hospitals and schools across the globe.
How to you kill two birds with one stone? We haven’t been back to the moon since the Apollo missions and we have a looming energy crisis. Former NASA astronaut Harrison Schmitt has a big plan to solve both those issues.
Former astronaut, Apollo moonwalker, geologist and former Senator Harrison Schmitt has a modest plan to solve the world’s energy problems. All we need is $15 billion over 15 years and some fusion reactors that have yet to be invented.
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Sir John Frederick William Herschel
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.
No, not the one about the Hollywood studio and all that -the other one.
A WALK ON THE MOON
On August 25, 1835, the first of a series of front-page article was published in the Sun, a two-year-old newspaper in New York City. The subject was Sir John Frederick William Herschel, one of the most respected scientists of his day, especially in the field of astronomy. He’d already identified and named seven moons of Saturn and four of Uranus, and had received numerous awards for his work, including a British knighthood. The information for the article came from the Edinburgh Journal of Science and a Dr. Andrew Grant, who had recently accompanied Dr. Herschel to South Africa, where they were mapping the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. To do the job properly, Herschel had built a massive telescope -the lens was 24 feet in diameter- that operated “on an entirely new principle.” It was all very scientific and complicated.
The first article didn’t reveal much, but over the next six days readers received some amazing news. In the course of his investigations with the new device, Hershel had aimed his new telescope at the moon. The scope was so powerful that looking through it was almost like standing on the lunar surface, enabling Herschel to make an astonishing discovery: The moon was teeming with life. And not just plants -there were animals running all over the place.
EXPERTS AGREE
Extraterrestrial life was a hot topics in the early 1800s. Telescopes were getting larger, and astronomers were discovering more and more stars, moons, planets, comets, nebulae, etc. Along with these discoveries some claims -sometimes from respected astronomers- that it was only a matter of time before life was discovered on other planets. One especially popular book at the time was Christian Philosopher, or the Connexion of Science and Philosophy with Religion, by Scottish scientist and minister Thomas Dick, first published in 1823. In it, Dock estimated (somehow) that there were roughly 21 trillion inhabitants in our solar system -4 million of whom lived on the moon!
MOON BATS
Over the six days, the Sun’s readers learned even more new information about the moon. A few examples: The lunar surface is covered in forests, lakes, rivers, and seas, inhabited by spherical creatures that rolled across the beautiful beaches, blue unicorns that wander the mountains, and two-legged beavers that live in huts and use fire. But there was one even more outlandish claim: There are intelligent humanoids on the moon -about four feet tall, largely covered in hair, with faces that are “a slight improvement upon that of a large orangutan.” And they have wings. They spend their time flying around, eating fruit, bathing, and talking with each other. Herschel gave them the scientific name Vespertilio-homo, or “man-bat,” and said they were actually civilized.
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I knew this, but only because I recall the approximate the number of miles to the moon, and the circumference of the earth. Those near my age might also remember that a fast rocket ship takes three days to get to the moon. -via reddit
A collision eons ago between the earth and another celestial body throw vaporized rock into the atmosphere, some of which eventually became the moon. If this is true, you’d think that the earth and the moon would share the same basic materials, but there is more iron on the moon and more magnesium on earth.
Now researchers have an answer, and it’s completely awesome. Magma rain would resolve the mystery, as rising rock vapor would see its magnesium oxide start to condense into droplets and fall back onto the planet’s surface. The iron oxide inside the rock vapor wouldn’t have condensed as easily, meaning far more of it got mixed into the disc that became the Moon.
Which evokes some interesting mental pictures resembling heavy metal album covers. Link -via Geekosystem
(Image credit: Fahad Sulehria)
In case you couldn’t stay up all night and watch it, or you are someplace where it wasn’t visible, here is the video of last night’s lunar eclipse. Four hours of moonlight are compressed into two minutes. The video was captured over Gainesville, Florida by professor William Castleman. -via The Daily What
The only total lunar eclipse of 2010 will be visible from all of North America on Monday night/Tuesday morning. That won’t happen again until 2014.
The entire 72 minutes of the total lunar eclipse will be visible from all of North and South America, the northern and western part of Europe, and a small part of northeast Asia including Korea and much of Japan. Totality will also be visible in its entirety from the North Island of New Zealand and Hawaii.
In all, an estimated 1.5 billion people will have an opportunity to enjoy the best part of this lunar show.
In other parts of the world, either only the partial stages of the eclipse will be visible or the eclipse will occur when it’s daytime and the moon is not above their local horizon.
The moon might take on some odd colors during the eclipse. This is the first lunar eclipse during the winter solstice in almost 500 years. Link -via reddit
NPR’s Robert Krulwich posted last week about comparing sizes. He was surprised to find out how small an area the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wandered when they made the first moon landing in 1969.
Armstrong’s longest, boldest walk took him about as far as Joe DiMaggio used to jog every inning — from home plate to about mid-center field. That’s like walking about a block from your hotel’s front door. Who knew?
Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong doesn’t do many interviews, so it was a surprise when he wrote to Krulwich to respond.
It is true that we were cautious in our planning. There were many uncertainties about how well our Lunar module systems and our Pressure suit and backpack would match the engineering predictions in the hostile lunar environment. We were operating in a near perfect vacuum with the temperature well above 200 degrees Fahrenheit with the local gravity only one sixth that of Earth. That combination cannot be duplicated here on Earth, but we tried as best we could to test our equipment for those conditions.
There’s a lot more you can read at NPR. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
The Apollo 11 astronauts left a variety of items on the moon. In addition to the flag, the plaque, and the silicon disk with goodwill statements, they left the item shown above. It is a small replica of an olive branch, described as “less than half a foot in length,” a traditional symbol of peace. The gesture was intended to serve as “a wish for peace for all mankind.”
Photo: Great Images in NASA, via Fresh Photons.
The blogger behind English Russia compiled high-resolution photos of displays inside the Moscow Aviation Institute. These include images of a proposed manned lunar lander.
Link via Fanboy | Photo: JRussus
Previously: Russians Tried to Beat Apollo 11 in the Race to the Moon by Crash Landing a Spacecraft
It won’t turn you into a werewolf (we don’t think), but you might find a real difference in beer brewed by the light of a full moon. A Belgian brewery is producing a beer called Paix-Dieu in just that way.
“We made several tests and noticed that the fermentation was more vigorous, more active,” explained Roger Caulier, the owner of Brewery Caulier, which began in the 1930s when his grandfather started selling homemade beer from a handcart.
“The end product was completely different, stronger, with a taste lasting longer in the mouth,” he said.
The full moon speeds up the fermentation process, shortening it to five days from seven, which adds extra punch to the beer without making it harsh, according to connoisseurs.
The resulting beer is 10% alcohol, which is not unusual in Belgium. Link
(Image credit: Reuters/Thierry Roge)
In 1970, during the Luna 17 mission, the Soviet space program landed the first ever remote-controlled vehicle on the moon. Lunokhod 1 spent eleven months taking pictures of the moon’s surface, and sent back about 20,000 images. It stopped communicating with the earth in 1971. Fast-forward 40 years, and read about how a new use has been found for Lunokhod 1 at the blog Starts With A Bang! Link
When you see the moon rising or setting over the landscape, it seems so big and close that you could reach out and touch it. Then a couple of hours later when it’s high in the sky, it seems so much smaller! Why does the moon look so huge on the horizon? The moon stays the same, but your brain experiences an optical illusion.
One of my favorite brain-benders is the Ponzo Illusion. You’ve seen it: the simplest case is with two short horizontal lines, one above the other, between two slanting but near-vertical lines. The upper line looks longer than the lower line, even though they’re the same length.
The illusion works because our brains are a bit wonky. The slanted lines make us think that anything near the top is farther away; the lines force our brain to think those lines are parallel but receding in the distance (like railroad tracks). The two horizontal lines are physically the same length, but our brain thinks the upper one is farther away. If it’s farther away, then duh, our brain says to itself, it must be bigger than the lower one. So we perceive it that way.
See examples of how this works at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link
Why The Moon Hates The Beach T-Shirt – $14.95
Let’s see if you get the humor in this sweet cartoon of Why The Moon Hates The Beach by Mark Heath.
More T-Shirts by Mark over at the NeatoShop | Mark’s official website | Gallery at American Scientist
If you love science cartoons, you’ll love Mark Heath’s No Brow Cartoons! Mark, who also drew the nationally syndicated Spot the Frog comic strip till 2008, is kind enough to allow us to adapt his awesome cartoons into T-shirt designs available from the NeatoShop: Link
Links: Mark’s official website | No Brow Cartoons gallery at American Scientist
