Sunset on Mars

(Jet Propulsion Laboratory) NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this view of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover's location in Gale Crater.

This was the first sunset observed in color by Curiosity. The image comes from the left-eye camera of the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam)...

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• Sunset in Mars' Gale Crater

Mercury

(Telegraph) An image of the planet Mercury produced by Nasa's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (or MESSENGER) probe. These colors are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but rather the colours enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury's surface, according to Nasa. The MESSENGER spacecraft that made surprising discoveries of ice and other materials on Mercury will make a crash landing into the planet around April 30, scientists said. 

Picture: REUTERS/NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

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• The week in pictures: 17th April 2015

NASA builds a time-machine telescope 100 times as powerful as the Hubble

(The Washington Post) Inside a very big and very clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., nearly 30 workers dressed in white protective suits, goggles and blue booties cluster around the parts of a time machine.

These parts — gold-covered mirrors, tennis-court-size sun shields, delicate infrared cameras — are slowly being put together to become the James Webb Space Telescope.

Astronomers are hoping that the Webb will be able to collect light that is very far away from us and is moving still farther away. The universe has been expanding ever since the big bang got it started, but scientists reckon that if the telescope is powerful enough, they just might be able to see the birth of the first galaxies, some 13.5 billion years ago.

“This is similar to archaeology,” says Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who helped plan Webb’s science mission. “We are digging deep into the universe. But as the sources of light become fainter and farther away, you need a big telescope like the James Webb.”

Named for a former NASA director, the 21-foot-diameter Webb telescope will be 100 times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990. Although Hubble wasn’t the first space telescope, its images of far-off objects have dazzled the public and led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as determining how fast the universe is expanding.

The Webb will be both bigger and located in a darker part of space than Hubble, enabling it to capture images from the faintest galaxies. Four infrared cameras will capture light that is moving away from us very quickly and that has shifted from the visible to the infrared spectrum, described as red-shifted. The advantage of using infrared light is that it is not blocked by clouds of gas and dust that may lie between the telescope and the light. Webb’s mirrors are covered in a thin layer of gold that absorbs blue light but reflects yellow and red visible light, and its cameras will detect infrared light and a small part of the visible spectrum. As objects move away from us, the wavelength of their light shifts from visible light to infrared light. That’s why the Webb’s infrared cameras will be able to see things that are both far away and moving away from us... (continued)

Read More at MSN

Link:

• NASA builds a time-machine telescope 100 times as powerful as the Hubble

Mars - Bright Strange Light Captured by NASA

A NASA camera on Mars has captured what appears to be artificial light emanating outward from the planet's surface. Photo: NASA.gov Photos

By Carol Christian, Houston Chronicle

A NASA camera on Mars has captured what appears to be artificial light emanating outward from the planet's surface.

The photo, beamed millions of miles from Mars to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was taken last week, apparently by one of two NASA rovers on the red planet.

Although the space agency hasn't issued any official statement yet about the phenomenon, bloggers and NASA enthusiasts have started chiming in.. (continued)

Read More at SFGate.com

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• NASA photo captures strange bright light coming out of Mars

Related:

• Is the Vatican Hiding Aliens?

Voyager 1 Enters Interstellar Space

By Father Gordon J. MacRae at These Stone Walls

....This milestone for Voyager is a very big deal for science and for planet Earth, but there’s also something humbling about it. TSW readers of a certain age will remember the great 1968 film masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey” for which producer/director Stanley Kubrick won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1969. Based on a novella by science fiction legend, Arthur C. Clarke entitled, The Sentinel, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 vision of what human space travel would look like by 2001.


It included commercial airline shuttle flights to a giant space station in orbit around Earth, excavations on the dark side of the Moon, and a science crew sent in cryogenic stasis to the moons of Jupiter shepherded by two pilots played by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. They were guided on the mission by HAL-9000, a computer (Mac or PC? You decide!) suffering a nervous breakdown. “Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” ordered stranded astronaut, David Bowman (Keir Dullea). “I’m sorry, Dave, but I can’t do that,” HAL-9000 calmly replied.

When the real 2001 came and went, the reality of space travel was not even close to what Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick envisioned. NASA’s manned Apollo lunar landings had been abandoned decades earlier, and the only orbiting space station, a tin can next to Kubrick’s vision, was Russia.

Voyager’s real space odyssey of 2012 might be a lot less glamorous than manned flights to the moons of Jupiter, but it’s still a great moment in human history. For the very first time, an object created by human beings has left our Solar System to begin a journey into space beyond the influence of our star, the Sun. Voyager has passed at last into what Star Trek called “The Final Frontier.” For science fiction buffs, that might seem one small step for man, but for science itself, it’s one giant leap for mankind.
WHY 1977?

Once every 176 years, the five outer planets of our Solar System – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and the now downgraded Pluto – are aligned in such a pattern that a spacecraft launched from Earth to Jupiter at just the right time would be able to visit the other planets using a slingshot trick of physics called “gravity assist.”

The Voyager 1 and 2 planetary probes were launched in the summer of 1977 to take advantage of this rare alignment. The next opportunity would have been the year 2153. Voyager 2 was actually launched first on August 20, 1977 followed by Voyager 1 on September 5. They were named in reverse order because it was calculated that Voyager 1 would overtake Voyager 2 after reaching Jupiter in March of 1979.

The slingshot effect of “gravity assist” shot Voyager 1 away from Jupiter for a flyby of Saturn in 1980, Uranus in 1985, and then Pluto in 1989, while Voyager 2 took a slingshot from Uranus to Neptune. After visiting Pluto in August of 1989, it took Voyager 1 another 23 years to reach and break through the outer limits of the Solar System, something that happened last month... (continued)

Read More at These Stone Walls

Spidery black objects on Mars surface raise speculation

Scientists are trying to identify the strange black spidery objects in these images. (Michael Benson/NASA/JPL/University

By Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News | The Sideshow 

Someone alert Ziggy Stardust, there appear to be spiders on Mars.

Strange black objects seen from 200 miles above the surface of Mars are generating interest and speculation that the unidentified objects could be anything from geysers to sunbathing colonies of microorganisms.

NPR presents several photos of the objects, including one taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Jan. 27, 2010, that appears to show "little black flecks dotting the ridges, mostly on the sunny side, like sunbathing spiders sitting in rows."

The objects were first spotted in 1998. Interestingly, they appear when the surface of Mars begins to warm, showing up in the same location most of the time. And then when the Martian winter approaches, they disappear with the same precise regularity. The images have been brought into greater detail by Michael Benson in his book "Planetfall: New Solar System Visions."

Most scientists, including teams from the U.S. Geological Survey, Hungary and the European Space Agency, have their own theories, but the leading explanation is that the objects are geysers of CO2 exploding from underneath the planet's surface.

"If you were there, you'd be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice," Phil Christensen of Arizona State University told NPR. "All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air. The ground below would be rumbling. You'd feel it in your space boots."

And while the geyser theory is the most popular explanation, it has yet to be verified.

In the meantime, there are some interesting alternative theories, including one from a group of Hungarian scientists, who have speculated that the objects are actually colonies of photosynthetic Martian microorganisms that emerge each year to sunbathe in the warm weather.

What the objects may look like up close. (Artist rendering by Ron Miller/JPL/Arizona State University)

• Spidery black objects on Mars surface raise speculation

Related:

• Mars - Bright Strange Light Captured by NASA

Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest-Ever View of the Universe

(NASA) Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe.

Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time.

The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see...

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• Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest-Ever View of the Universe

Strange Mystery Spheres on Mars Baffle Scientists

(Space.com) A strange picture of odd, spherical rock formations on Mars from NASA's Opportunity rover has scientists scratching their heads over what exactly they're looking at.

The new Mars photo by Opportunity shows a close-up of a rock outcrop called Kirkwood covered in blister-like bumps that mission scientists can't yet explain. At first blush, the formations appear similar to so-called Martian "blueberries" — iron-rich spherical formations first seen by Opportunity in 2004 — but they actually differ in several key ways, scientist said.

"This is one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission," said rover mission principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in a statement. "Kirkwood is chock full of a dense accumulation of these small spherical objects. Of course, we immediately thought of the blueberries, but this is something different. We never have seen such a dense accumulation of spherules in a rock outcrop on Mars."

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• Strange Mystery Spheres on Mars Baffle Scientists 

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• Mars - Bright Strange Light Captured by NASA

Flying Over the Earth at Night

From Astronomy Picture of the Day

Former NASA Director Says Muslim Outreach Push 'Deeply Flawed'

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden

By Judson Berger

(Fox News) The former head of NASA on Tuesday described as "deeply flawed" the idea that the space exploration agency's priority should be outreach to Muslim countries, after current Administrator Charles Bolden made that assertion in an interview last month.

"NASA ... represents the best of America. Its purpose is not to inspire Muslims or any other cultural entity," Michael Griffin, who served as NASA administrator during the latter half of the Bush administration, told FoxNews.com.

Bolden created a firestorm after telling Al Jazeera last month that President Obama told him before he took the job that he wanted him to do three things: inspire children to learn math and science, expand international relationships and "perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math
and engineering."

NASA Muslim Outreach Store

Officials from the White House and NASA on Tuesday stood by Bolden's statement that part of his mission is to improve relations with Muslim countries -- though NASA backed off the claim that such international diplomacy is Bolden's "foremost" responsibility.

Griffin said Tuesday that collaboration with other countries, including Muslim nations, is welcome and should be encouraged -- but that it would be a mistake to prioritize that over NASA's "fundamental mission" of space exploration.

"If by doing great things, people are inspired, well then that's wonderful," Griffin said. "If you get it in the wrong order ... it becomes an empty shell."

Griffin added: "That is exactly what is in danger of happening."

He also said that while welcome, Muslim-nation cooperation is not vital for U.S. advancements in space exploration.

"There is no technology they have that we need," Griffin said.

The former administrator stressed that any criticism should be directed at Obama, not Bolden, since NASA merely carries out policy.

The White House stood by Bolden on Tuesday. Spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a written statement to FoxNews.com that Obama "wants NASA to engage with the world's best scientists and engineers as we work together to push the boundaries of exploration.

"Meeting that mandate requires NASA to partner with countries around the world like Russia and Japan, as well as collaboration with Israel and with many Muslim-majority countries. The space race began as a global competition, but, today, it is a global collaboration," he said.

See the Al Jazeera Interview

Bob Jacobs, NASA's assistant administrator for public affairs, echoed that point. However, he said that Bolden was speaking of priorities when it came to "outreach" and not about NASA's primary missions of "science, aeronautics and space exploration." He said the "core mission" is exploration and that it was unfortunate Bolden's comments are now being viewed through a "partisan prism."

Though the Al Jazeera interview drew widespread attention, it wasn't the first time Bolden made the assertion.

A Feb. 16 blog in the Orlando Sentinel reported that Bolden discussed the outreach during a lecture to engineering students. As he did in the interview with Al Jazeera last month, Bolden was quoted then saying Obama told him to "find ways to reach out to dominantly Muslim countries."

He reportedly talked about the importance of helping countries establish space programs and pointed to the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, as a possible partner.

"We really like Indonesia because the State Department, the Department of Education (and) other agencies in the U.S. are reaching out to Indonesia as the largest Muslim nation in the world," he said.

Bolden did not describe such outreach as his prime mission at the time.

The NASA administrator was in the Middle East last month marking the one-year anniversary since Obama delivered an address to Muslim nations in Cairo. Bolden spoke in June at the American University in Cairo, and in the interview with Al Jazeera he described space travel as an international collaboration of which Muslim nations must be a part.

"It is a matter of trying to reach out and get the best of all worlds, if you will, and there is much to be gained by drawing in the contributions that are possible from the Muslim (nations)," he said.

He held up the International Space Station as a model, praising the contributions there from the Russians and the Chinese.

However, Bolden denied the suggestion that he was on a diplomatic mission. "Not at all. It's not a diplomatic anything," he said.

He also said the United States is not going to travel beyond low-Earth orbit on its own and that no country is going to make it to Mars without international help.

Griffin disputed this point. He said the U.S. can still make those strides without international aid if it wishes, and that, "To the extent that we wish to go to Mars, we can go to Mars."

Griffin said the U.S. should in fact seek international cooperation for those missions, but that it would be "clearly false" to suggest the U.S. needs that cooperation.

Bolden has faced criticism this year for overseeing the cancellation of the agency's Constellation program, which was building new rockets and spaceships capable of returning astronauts to the moon. Stressing the importance of international cooperation in future missions, Bolden told Al Jazeera that the moon, Mars and asteroids are still planned destinations for NASA.

Fox News' Brian Wilson contributed to this report.

• Former NASA Director Says Muslim Outreach Push 'Deeply Flawed'
• NASA Muslim Outreach Store

Congress to dump Obama NASA plan

By Rob Coppinger

White House plans to axe NASA's return-to-the-Moon Constellation programme and ground the Space Shuttle have sparked unified opposition from Congress, which looks determined to preserve a full spectrum of US manned spaceflight activities.

A draft Congressional bill leaked to Flight International sets out the politicians' alternate plan. It involves possibly extending Shuttle life to 2015, running competitive commercial crew and cargo programmes and continuing development of Constellation's vehicles including a heavylift rocket designed to get astronauts to the Moon in the 2020s and then Mars.

In a heated hearing on Capitol Hill, President Obama's NASA administrator Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and Shuttle commander, had to defend his deputy Lori Beth Garver and the president's plan to shift NASA's focus from missions to capabilities under the fiscal year 2011 budget request.

In the 24 February hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee's science and space subcommittee one senator criticised Garver as the alleged author of the plan and budget, which the subcommittee's members described as ending all US human spaceflight efforts with its retirement of the Shuttle fleet this year and cancellation of the Constellation.

Referring to the space programme as bipartisan, subcommittee chairman senator Bill Nelson of Florida says of the opposition to the Obama plan: "I have never seen [Congress] as unified as we are now."

Much of the Congressional opposition to Obama's plan stems from estimates pegging direct job losses from cutting Constellation, Shuttle and other programmes at 30,000, including 7,000 at the Kennedy Space Center.

Bolden told the hearing that the Obama exploration goal was Mars, but during the early February budget roll-out he said that the plan's destinations would be decided by a "national conversation".

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One Small Cut For Obama...

Politicians fight to keep America's moon mission alive

Richard Luscombe in Miami
guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 February 2010 21.23 GMT

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin stands on the moon. It is now more than 40 years since mankind first went there. Photograph: NASA/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

The announcement of an end to immediate ambitions for an American to again reach the moon, on the seventh anniversary of the Columbia space shuttle disaster, sets the stage for a furious battle in Congress over US manned space exploration.

Politicians from Florida, Texas and Alabama, three states that have lost thousands of jobs in the space industry from this year's planned retirement of the ageing shuttle fleet, promised a fight to keep the moon programme, Constellation, alive.

"They are replacing lost shuttle jobs too slowly, risking US leadership in space to China and Russia, and relying too heavily on unproven companies," said Bill Nelson, a Democratic Senator for Florida and former astronaut who flew one mission in 1986.

Michael Griffin, who resigned as Nasa chief when Obama took office, branded the plan "disastrous", likening it to Richard Nixon's cancellation of the Apollo programme in the 1970s. "It means that essentially the US has decided that they're not going to be a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future," he told The Washington Post...

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From the Moon to the Earth

click image to enlarge

From the Moon to the Earth
Credit: Apollo 11, NASA

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Life on Mars

By PAUL SUTHERLAND
Sun Spaceman

Published: Today

ALIEN microbes living just below the Martian soil are responsible for a haze of methane around the Red Planet, Nasa scientists believe.

The gas, belched in vast quantities in our world by cows, was detected by orbiting spacecraft and from Earth using giant telescopes.

Discovery ... gas around Mars

Nasa are today expected to confirm its presence during a briefing at their Washington HQ.

And the find is seen as exciting new evidence that Martian microbes are still alive today.

Some scientists reckon methane is also produced by volcanic processes. But there are NO known active volcanoes on Mars.

Furthermore, Nasa has found the gas in the same regions as clouds of water vapour, the vital �drink� needed to support life.

Mission ... probe on the surface of Mars

Experts speculate that the methane is being emitted as a waste product by organisms called methanogens living in water beneath underground ice.

And they would have to be alive today because the methane would otherwise have been lost from the Martian atmosphere.

What a scoop ... Phoenix lander dug up chunks of ice last year

John Murray — a member of the Mars Express European space probe team — believes the mini-Martians may be in a form of suspended animation and could even be REVIVED.

He has found overwhelming evidence of a vast frozen ocean beneath the dust near the Martian equator where simple life could have thrived as microbes.

Today’s briefing will feature a star panel of Mars experts headed by Michael Meyer, chief scientist for Nasa’s Mars programme.

UK Mars expert Professor Colin Pillinger believes the methane can only point to the presence of life on the planet.

Space neighbours ... Earth and Venus rise over Mars in mock-up

His ill-fated Beagle 2 probe was carrying a laboratory that would have looked directly for such signs of life when it crashed on Christmas Day 2003.

Prof Pillinger, below, told The Sun last night: �Methane is a product of biology. For methane to be in Mars’ atmosphere, there has to be a replenishable source.

�The most obvious source of methane is organisms. So if you find methane in an atmosphere, you can suspect there is life.

�It’s not proof, but it makes it worth a much closer look.�

Nasa’s findings confirm studies by Europe’s Mars Express probe, which has been orbiting the planet for five years and also reported signs of methane in 2004.

Britain’s top space expert Nick Pope last night hailed the new evidence of life as �the most important discovery of all time�.

He said: �What could be more profound than to know it’s not just us out there?

Expert ... Colin Pillinger

"We’ve really only scratched the surface — it’s an absolute certainty that there is life out there and we are not alone.

�If there is life on Mars then the logical conclusion is that there must be life elsewhere too.

�If it’s happened here on Earth, then why shouldn’t it happen anywhere? The implication is this is a universal law.

�Mars is very similar to Earth. It’s about the same size, it’s a rocky inner planet.

�Most scientists believe it probably has liquid water which is almost universally agreed as the pre-requisite for life. I am certain there is other life in the Universe and, most likely, intelligent life.�

The Red Planet has gripped the public imagination for more than a century as a possible home for aliens.

But life could not survive on its surface because, unlike the Earth, Mars has no magnetic shield to protect it against deadly sun radiation.

The planet resembles our own in many ways. It is made of rock, it has an atmosphere and weather systems.

Although much smaller with a diameter of around 4,222 miles, Mars’ day is just 40 minutes longer than ours and its tilted axis gives it seasons.

Water has been found in the form of buried ice and scientists believe that two billion years ago, Mars was covered with liquid oceans.

Proof that water is still on Mars came in 2007 when Mars Express used ground-piercing radar to study the region around the planet’s South Pole.

Nasa’s latest lander Phoenix dug up chunks of Martian ice last year. It swiftly evaporated into the thin atmosphere.

Nasa have controversially hit the headlines before for claiming evidence for Martians.

In 1996, they said they had discovered fossilised organisms in a meteorite from the planet.

But other scientists were sceptical.

Today’s conference will be broadcast live online by NASA TV (www.nasa.gov/ntv ) at 7pm.

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

At the Sun's Edge
Credit & Copyright: Catalin Beldea (Descopera Magazine)

Explanation: A train trip on the Trans-Siberian railway to Novosibirsk resulted in this stunning view along the edge of the Sun recorded during the August 1st total solar eclipse. The picture is a composite of two images taken at special moments in the eclipse sequence, corresponding to the very beginning and the very end of the total eclipse phase. Those times are known to eclipse chasers as 2nd and 3rd contact. Bright beads around the Moon's dark silhouette are rays of sunlight shining through lunar valleys at the edge of the lunar disk. But the composite view also captures solar prominences, looping structures of hot plasma suspended in magnetic fields, extending beyond the Sun's edge.

Cause of Northern Lights discovered by Nasa

Nasa scientists have discovered what they think causes the Northern Lights, the dramatic, colourful displays seen in the sky seen near the Earth's poles.

By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
Last Updated: 1:29AM BST 26 Jul 2008

Nasa say explosions of magnetic energy occurring about one-third of the way to the moon are responsible for the lights, known as auroras Photo: AP

After a year of studying the mysterious phenomenon, researchers say explosions of magnetic energy occurring about one-third of the way to the moon are responsible for the lights, known as auroras.

Researchers used a network of five Nasa satellites on a mission dubbed Themis to observe a geomagnetic storm in February.

They correlated results with the findings of observatories in Canada and Alaska, which simultaneously tracked the brightening and movements of the northern, aurora borealis, and southern lights, aurora australis. Both moved across the sky at the same time.

"This is a question that people have been after since the beginning of the Space Age," Vassilis Angelopoulos, the University of California-based principal investigator for the Themis mission, told New Scientist.

"The reason it has not been shown up to now is that we didn't have the right satellites at the right positions and the right times."

Mr Angelopoulos said the observed storm about 80,000 miles from Earth was triggered by a phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection when the Earth's magnetic field lines are stretched like rubber bands by solar energy, snap and ping back to Earth where they reconnect, releasing the energy.

It is the release of this stored-up energy that powers the auroras, he said...

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Catholic University professor pioneers lunar telescope-making method

By Brandy Wilson
Catholic News Service

GREENBELT, Md. (CNS) -- An adjunct professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington has devised a new way to see outer space -- from the moon.

Astrophysicist Peter Chen, along with colleagues Michael Van Steenberg, Ronald Oliversen and Douglas Rabin at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has pioneered a method to create giant telescope mirrors on the moon.

"We can do something really unique here. We can go to the moon and create a large telescope 20 or 50 meters across. This is far out of anything that exists on earth," said Chen in an interview with Catholic News Service July 8 at the space center in Greenbelt, a Washington suburb.

Gravity limits to much smaller diameters how big telescopes can be built on earth.

The new technique uses a combination of a carbon-fiber composite material known as carbon nanotubes, simulated moon dust and epoxies. Chen had already been working with carbon-fiber materials. Van Steenberg was working with lunar dust. They wondered what they might get if they combined the ingredients.

"It came about by accident," Chen said. "We were just playing around."

After several attempts and a "few gooey messes," they came up with something the consistency of a very hard concrete brick. They later determined that by adding an aluminum coating they also could make a sturdy telescope mirror that could withstand extreme temperature changes on the moon and the rare meteor hit. Currently, there are no working telescopes on the moon.

"People are trying to find interesting ways to (advance) science by going back to the moon, to justify going back to the moon," Frank Reddy, a senior editor at Astronomy magazine, told CNS in a phone interview. Reddy attended a presentation Chen gave to the American Astronomical Society.

The testing equipment for Chen and his colleagues' research was fairly low-tech. That first successful prototype was formed using the bottom of a foam cup as a mold. Chen spun subsequent prototypes on a pottery wheel to get the mirror's parabolic shape. Test models were hardened in cake pans.

Despite the low-tech approach, their technique breaks new ground for several reasons. First, it utilizes lunar regolith, or moon dust, as an ingredient. Moon dust is an abundant, local resource on the moon for which scientists until now haven't found much use. Second, the mirrors will be manufactured on the moon.

Until now, telescopes have been produced on earth and shipped to outer space. Making the telescope mirrors on the moon would reduce the cost and risks entailed with shipping a giant telescope mirror to the moon. No longer would their size be limited by the size of the rocket.

Rabin, chief of NASA's Solar Physics Laboratory, said, "You have people thinking about a new way to do things. Ordinary ways of putting telescopes on the moon, scientists have not found that attractive. But when you say 20 meters, everything changes. It's an innovative way of thinking."

The method Chen and his colleagues developed is new, but he has worked on producing lightweight telescope mirrors for more than a decade and has worked on several space missions.

"I've always enjoyed looking at the stars and wondered what was out there," he said.

Chen's work could make it easier to find out. By comparison, the largest telescope in space, the Hubble Space Telescope, has a diameter of 2.4 meters. Chen's method could produce mirrors that start at 20 to 50 meters in diameter. Larger mirrors reflect more light, thus offering finer detail. A 50-meter telescope could reasonably detect signs of life in a planetary atmosphere.

The bricklike material could also be used to create housing structures on the moon as well as solar collectors. "The whole premise of building structures on the moon is something NASA's been concerned with for a very long time," Van Steenberg said.

The method is still in development and because NASA won't be returning to the moon for at least another 10 years, it'll be awhile before it can be field-tested on the moon.

But Chen's work is not without its critics. Larry Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is skeptical.

"It's pie in the sky," he told CNS in a phone interview. "The showstopper is the amount of material you have to bring from the earth. I think it is a way of making mirrors, but there are other ways you can do it that are more efficient."

But Reddy said, "How practical this is remains to be seen, but it's not crazy."

In addition to his work with NASA, Chen is an adjunct research professor for Catholic University's Institute for Astrophysics and Computational Science. He's a married father of four, with a cat he said thinks it's a dog.

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First Missionary in Outer Space?

Padre Giovanni Trigilio

Astronomy Picture of the Day

2007, December 15

Mountains of Creation
Credit: Lori Allen (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA) et al., JPL-Caltech, NASA

Explanation: This fantastic skyscape lies at the eastern edge of giant stellar nursery W5, about 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. An infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope, it features interstellar clouds of cold gas and dust sculpted by winds and radiation from a hot, massive star outside the picture (just above and to the right). Still swaddled within the cosmic clouds, newborn stars are revealed by Spitzer's penetrating gaze, their formation also triggered by the massive star. Fittingly dubbed "Mountains of Creation", these interstellar clouds are about 10 times the size of the analogous Pillars of Creation in M16, made famous in a 1995 Hubble Space Telescope view. W5 is also known as IC 1848 and together with IC 1805 it is part of a complex region popularly dubbed the Heart and Soul Nebulae. The Spitzer image spans about 70 light-years at the distance of W5.

_______________________________

2007, December 14

Click above pic to enlarge

Apollo 17: Shorty Crater Panorama
Credit: Apollo 17 Crew, NASA; Panorama Assembly: Mike Constantine

Explanation: In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the Moon in the Taurus-Littrow valley, while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. This sharp panorama is digitally stitched together from pictures taken by Cernan as he and Schmitt roamed the valley floor. Starting with a view of the imposing South Massif, scrolling the panorama to the right will reveal Schmitt and the lunar rover at the edge of Shorty Crater, near the spot where geologist Schmitt discovered orange lunar soil. The Apollo 17 crew returned with 110 kilograms of rock and soil samples, more than was returned from any of the other lunar landing sites. Now thirty five years later, Cernan and Schmitt are still the last to walk on the Moon.

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