Water everywhere on Mars and Moon

Yes water, water is everywhere on Moon and Mars.......Ice deposits at least 6 feet can be found in some small craters on the Moon it was reported by researchers on 12 th April 2010 as the studies showed evidence of water on Moon and Mars .
According to one of the recent studies ice has melted and re-frozen on Mars.
India's spacecraft Chandrayaan has found evidence of thick ice being deposited on some permanently shaded craters on the Moon. Researchers say that Moon has been constantly bombarded with water-bearing objects such as comets and meteorites and implanted with solar wind hydrogen over geological time and some of this material must have made its way into these cold, dark areas.
One of the study showed that 6-feet wide gully on Mars had become nearly 400 feet longer over 2 years and it can be best explain the melting of small amounts of water ice.
Photographs also show dark patches in gully as well as in some smaller new channels.
In September last year several teams reported clear evidence of water likely frozen on desert surfaces of both Moon and Mars and researchers have also seen snow in Mars.

Does Moon water comes in three flavours ?

There has been surprise discovery of water in Moon . Now the scientists are saying that the water present in Moon's surface comes in three flavours !
According to the findings of Chandrayaan -1 , NASA's Mini-SAR team has found 40 craters which has water ice which is expected to be 2 m deep. If the scientists are to be believed and the water from these craters are converted into rocket fuel , we will have enough fuel to to launch the equivalent of one space shuttle per day for more than 2000 years. Isn't it a great news ?
The three flavours of water are - Mini -SAR's thick lenses of nearly pure water ice , LCROSS's mix of ice crystal and dirt and M -cube's thin layer which is across the surface of the Moon.
It is believed that pure water has deposited on the surface of Moon most probably by the passing comets.Whereas , some have formed under the surface mixing with lunar material and the rest of water is supposed to be formed on the surface through interactions with the solar wind.
Scientists are now seriously thinking about a Lunar Hydrosphere !

Full Moon and crimes

I love the sight of a full moon , poets love them and so are the criminals......... yes it is believed that the crime rate is high on a full moon , although there is no solid proof regarding it.

Even the scientists cannot give a correlation between the crime rates on a full moon lit night , babies conceived or born during that time or any other such occurences.

It is just a myth and nothing else . It is believed that we usually notice increase in such activities during a full moon night as we remember a full moon phase more than other moon phases.

If a crime is committed on a full moon night people remember it more as it is obvious than when the moon was a crescent.
crimes, births, and strange occurrences happen all month long, but only those that occur around Full Moon cause people to talk about them.
For everyone who love to watch a full moon would like to mention that 30th January,2009 will be a full moon lit night and it will be the biggest full moon of 2010.

What is Harvest Moon?

I was surfing net when i stumbled upon a term "Harvest Moon" which i would like to share with you all in my this post.

Harvest moon is defined as the full moon closest to autumnal equinox . It is not an annual phenomenon but occurs once every four years and it occurred on 3rd October, 2009. It is usually brighter or colorful than other moons which is due to seasonal tilting of the year.

The Harvest moon is also known as the Wine Moon, the Singing Moon and the Elk Moon.

Enjoy the above beautiful pic of Harvest Moon taken on 3rd October, 2009.

Water found on Moon surface

My earlier post was Was moon bombing a success now LCROSS team has successfully found water on permanently shadowed lunar crater . The team was able to observe 25 liters of water with spectroscopic telescope.

The team has also found some components such as Sodium and Carbondioxide which they are analysing.

The impact created by the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket created a two-part plume of material from the bottom of the crater. The first part was a high angle plume about 10-12 meters across of vapor and fine dust and the second a lower angle ejecta curtain of heavier material. This material has not seen sunlight in billions of years.

Lunar scientists are trying to find out that how the water has come, whether by comets , meteorites or by some process in moon or the moon surface is creating water.

Moon crash plume visible to spacecraft

The image of impact plume of "moon bombing" by NASA.

In my previous blog posts Moon bombing to probe water and Was NASA moon bombing a success i told you about "moon bombing" by NASA .

NASA had said that observers from Earth will be able to see the plume of " Moon bombing'' with their telescopes but no one was able to see that from Earth.

Acoording to NASA nine instruments on board the LCROSS spacecraft captured the entire crash sequence of the Centaur impactor before the spacecraft itself impacted the surface of the moon.

From images and data, the team was able to determine the extent of the plume at 15 seconds after impact was approximately 6-8 km in diameter. The data which which the spacecraft has gathered is of high quality.

Water molecules on Lunar surface

NASA scientists have discovered water molecules in the polar regions of the moon. Water molecules are greater than predicted , but still relatively small.

Hydroxyl, a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom, also was found in the lunar soil.

NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, instrument reported the observations. M3 was carried into space on Oct. 22, 2008, aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, or VIMS, on NASA's Cassini spacecraft and the High-Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on NASA's EPOXI spacecraft contributed to confirmation of the finding. The spacecraft imaging spectrometers made it possible to map lunar water more effectively than ever before.

The M3 team found water molecules and hydroxyl at diverse areas of the sunlit region of the moon's surface, but the water signature appeared stronger at the moon's higher latitudes.

No water ice found in Japanese lunar mission

Japanese Selene lunar orbiter have failed to detect any signs of water in permanently shaded craters around the South pole of the Moon.

Although the Japanese lunar orbiter found no ice it did find a crater much deeper than other lunar craters of a similar diameter and internal temperatures that could support ice delivered by comets over billions of years.

It has also returned beautiful images of the Earth and Moon as the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing by Apollo 11.

First images from Lunar Reconnissance Orbiter

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has transmitted its first images since reaching moon.

LRO will help NASA to locate potential resources , describe the moon's radiation environment and identify safe landing sites for future explorers.

Moon mission picture of 1969 goes missing

The world is getting ready to celebrate next month the 40th anniversary of historical Apollo 11 flight which is the first manned mission to moon and the officials of Tata Institute Of Fundamental Reasearch (TIFR) at Colaba are trying to find out a priceless picture that is missing from their office.

The picture was autographed and presented to TIFR by the three astronauts Neil Armstrong , Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins who were the first humans to land on the surface of moon. The picture was the size of an A3 size paper placed in the director's office in TIFR and used to attract a lot of visitors.

New map shines light on Moon’s shadowed craters

A new high resolution map of the Moon’s rugged south pole region provides new and unprecedented detail of permanently shadowed craters that could be hiding water ice deposits.



The discovery of water ice reservoirs on the Moon would be a significant step to the future of maintaining a long-term human presence on the Moon.



The map was compiled using data from the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Solar System Radar, which, in a two and a half second round trip, uses a 70 metre dish to send radar signals to the Moon that are reflected back and detected by two 34 metre antennas.



LCROSS launched Thursday evening and along with its attached Centaur upper stage rocket will separately collide with the Moon, throwing up a pair of debris plumes which will be analysed for the presence of water ice or water vapour, hydrocarbons and other hydrated material.



Together with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which also launched yesterday and will create further detailed maps of the lunar surface, NASA will be well-equipped for human exploration of the lunar south pole.

Cassini finds Titan's clouds hang on to summer

Cloud chasers studying Saturn's moon Titan say its clouds form and move much like those on Earth, but in a much slower, more lingering fashion.

Their forecast for Titan's early autumn -- warm and wetter.

Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission have monitored Titan's atmosphere for three-and-a-half years, between July 2004 and December 2007, and observed more than 200 clouds. They found that the way these clouds are distributed around Titan matches scientists' global circulation models. The only exception is timing -- clouds are still noticeable in the southern hemisphere while fall is approaching.

As summer changes to fall at the equinox in August 2009, Titan's clouds are expected to disappear altogether. But, circulation models of Titan's weather and climate predict that clouds at the southern latitudes don't wait for the equinox and should have already faded out since 2005. However, Cassini was still able to see clouds at these places late in 2007, and some of them are particularly active at mid-latitudes and the equator.

Titan is the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere, and its climate shares Earth-like characteristics. Titan's dense, nitrogen-methane atmosphere responds much more slowly than Earth's atmosphere, as it receives about 100 times less sunlight because it is 10 times farther from the sun. Seasons on Titan last more than seven Earth years.

Scientists will continue to observe the long-term changes during Cassini's extended mission, which runs until the fall of 2010. Cassini is set to fly by Titan on June 6.

Twin spacecraft may reveal secret of moon's origin

Two places on opposite sides of Earth may hold the secret to how the moon was born. NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft are about to enter these zones, known as the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points, each centered about 93 million miles away along Earth's orbit.
As rare as free parking in New York City, L4 and L5 are among the special points in our solar system around which spacecraft and other objects can loiter. They are where the gravitational pull of a nearby planet or the sun balances the forces from the object's orbital motion. Such points closer to Earth are sometimes used as spaceship "parking lots", like the L1 point a million miles away in the direction of the sun. They are officially called Libration points or Lagrangian points after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an Italian-French mathematician who helped discover them.
L4 and L5 are where an object's motion can be balanced by the combined gravity of the sun and Earth. "These places may hold small asteroids, which could be leftovers from a Mars-sized planet that formed billions of years ago.about 4.5 billion years ago when the planets were still growing, this hypothetical world, called Theia, may have been nudged out of L4 or L5 by the increasing gravity of the other developing planets like Venus and sent on a collision course with Earth. The resulting impact blasted the outer layers of Theia and Earth into orbit, which eventually coalesced under their own gravity to form the moon."
The STEREO spacecraft are designed to give 3D views of space weather by observing the sun from two points of view and combining the images in the same way your eyes work together to give a 3D view of the world. STEREO "A" is moving slightly ahead of Earth and will pass through L4, and STEREO "B" is moving slightly behind Earth and will pass through L5. "Taking the time to observe L4 and L5 is kind of cool because it's free.

China's lunar probe lands on Moon

Chang'e- 1, China's first lunar probe, impacted the Moon at 4.13 p.m . Beijing Time (0813 GMT) on March 1, 2009 said sources with the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.
The satellite ended its 16- month mission on March 1, 2009 when it hit the lunar surface at 1.50 degrees south latitude and 52.36 degrees east longitude.
This is the first phase of China's three-stage moon mission, which will lead to a landing and launch of a rover vehicle around 2012.
"Chang'e" is name after legendary Chinese Moon goddess.

Over the moon- Chandrayaan pictures

Image by Moon Impact Probe gives a closer view of moon's surface

Scientist sees use of resources on Moon in future

Scientists around the world have come to understand that the Moon is the stepping stone for the future of human species beyond the Earth.
Moon Mineralogy Mapper , one of the 11 instruments on Chandrayaan-I has detected iron-bearing minerals in a lunar crater.
The crater is rich in olivine, which contains iron. Olivine can tell us about Moon and the Earth.
The current expectation is that water-ice is buried in lunar poles.