Brisbane Times NASA: Closest planet to sun, Mercury, harbors ice

This photo made available by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington on Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2012 shows a 68-mile-diameter crater, large indentation at center, in the north polar region of Mercury which has been shown to harbor water ice, thanks to measurements by the Messenger spacecraft. Scientists made the announcement Thursday, Nov. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)  

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Just in time for Christmas, scientists have confirmed a vast amount of ice at the north pole — on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.

The findings are from NASA’s Mercury-orbiting probe, Messenger, and the subject of three scientific papers released Thursday by the journal Science.

The frozen water is located in regions of Mercury’s north pole that always are in shadows, essentially impact craters. It’s believed the south pole harbors ice as well, though there are no hard data to support it. Messenger orbits much closer to the north pole than the south.

‘‘If you add it all up, you have on the order of 100 billion to 1 trillion metric tons of ice,’’ said David Lawrence of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. ‘‘The uncertainty on that number is just how deep it goes.’’

The ice is thought to be at least 1½ feet deep — and possibly as much as 65 feet deep.

There’s enough polar ice at Mercury, in fact, to bury an area the size of Washington, D.C., by two to 2½ miles deep, said Lawrence, the lead author of one of the papers.

‘‘These are very exciting results,’’ he added at a news conference.

For two decades, radar measurements taken from Earth have suggested the presence of ice at Mercury’s poles. Now scientists know for sure, thanks to Messenger, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.

The water almost certainly came from impacting comets, or possibly asteroids. Ice is found at the surface, as well as buried under a dark material.

Messenger was launched in 2004 and went into orbit 1½ years ago around Mercury, where temperatures reach 800 degrees. NASA hopes to continue observations well into next year.

Columbia University’s Sean Solomon, principal scientist for Messenger, stressed that no one is suggesting that Mercury might hold evidence of life, given the presence of water. But the latest findings may help explain how water and other building blocks of life arrived elsewhere in the solar system, he said.

Mercury is becoming the subject of new interest ‘‘where it wasn’t much of one before,’’ Solomon said.

U.S. government confirms world won't end in 2012

 

The U.S. government is rebutting claims that the end is nigh.
"The world will not end on December 21, 2012, or any day in 2012," an unsigned USA.gov blog asserts.
Some New Age theorists believe that the ancient Mayan civilization predicted a late December doomsday for all of humanity. Others believe the date signifies the start of a new era. Their predictions are based on the idea that the Mayan Long Count calendar "ends" in 2012 — something that scholars say is a misrepresentation.
"False rumors about the end of the world in 2012 have been commonplace on the Internet for some time. Many of these rumors involve the Mayan calendar ending in 2012 (it won’t), a comet causing catastrophic effects (definitely not), a hidden planet sneaking up and colliding with us (no and no), and many others," the government asserts in the post.
"Unfortunately, these rumors have many people frightened, especially children," the blog post says, noting that NASA has gotten more than 1,000 letters from Americans concerned about the apocalypse.
"At least a once a week I get a message from a young person — as young as 11 — who says they are ill and/or contemplating suicide because of the coming doomsday," David Morrison, a planetary astronomer and senior scientist for NASA who answers questions from the public about astrobiology tells USA.gov.
The government's blog post, however, seems to leave open the possibility of doomsday occurring in 2013 or beyond.

Are we the extra-terrestrials? May be

Canon 22.3 Megapixel EOS 5D Mark III Digital SLR Camera Body - 5260B002AA (Google Affiliate Ad)
Extra-terrestrial microbes might have brought life to the Earth, say scientists.
The theory is based on calculations showing a high likelihood of rock fragments from planets in other star systems landing on the Earth long ago, the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.
Some of them could have carried embedded micro-organisms, according to experts writing in the journal Astrobiology.

The research suggests the dormant bugs could easily have survived the long journey through space, despite high levels of cosmic radiation, the Mail said.
Simple life may equally well have travelled from the Earth to planets outside the solar system, the scientists believe.
The process, known as lithopanspermia, could mean the universe is teeming with Earth-like life.
“Our work says that lithopanspermia might have been very likely, and it may be the first paper to demonstrate that,” said lead researcher Edward Belbruno, from Princeton University in the US.

Google Street View coming to Safari, report says

 




Google is reportedly getting ready to make the maps experience on the iPhone a little easier — in the phone’s main browser.
According to a report from the New York Times’ David Pogue, Google is planning to roll out its Street View feature to mobile Safari users in the next two weeks. The Times has also reported that Google has submitted an app to Apple’s App Store that will go live by the end of the year, something the company has not confirmed.

Clays in Pacific lavas challenge wet early Mars idea

 

Satellite observations: A three-dimensional image of the Nili Fossae region of Mars showing the presence of abundant clay minerals (in magenta and blue hues)  

A study of rocks at an old A-bomb test site in the Pacific has led a team of scientists to conclude that early Mars was not so warm and wet as many argue.

The rocks at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia contain clay minerals that look like those seen on the Red Planet.
But whereas the Martian clays are taken to be the products of weathering of rocks by liquid water, the atoll's clays have a very different origin.
These were precipitated directly from water-rich molten rock as it cooled.
The research is published in Nature Geoscience by Prof Alain Meunier from the University of Poitiers, France, and colleagues.
It is interesting because it strikes at the heart of the notion that the Red Planet was awash with water, perhaps at its surface, more than 3.75 billion years ago - an idea that has been put forward to explain the great abundance of some clay deposits observed from orbit by satellites.
However, the process of clay production at Mururoa, if replicated and widespread on early Mars, would remove the need for such large volumes of water, and with it possibly a more benign environment for life to establish itself on the planet.
"Mars was not as warm and wet in its earliest time as some have suggested. I do not believe in an early ocean on Mars," Prof Meunier told BBC News.
But [the Mururoa process] explains only the earliest generation of clays on Mars, in the early Noachian period. In later periods, liquid water has existed on Mars' surface; that is undoubtedly the case."
Free space The atoll was the site of French nuclear testing from the 1960s to the 1990s.
A lot of rock was drilled from the island as part of that programme and is now available for study.

Prof Meunier's team shows that clays in these volcanic samples were formed directly in place, in the spaces that sometimes arise between cooling rock crystals. They were not the product of later alteration of the rock through long-term contact with water - the more familiar route to these minerals.
"Inside the basaltic rock as the lava is cooling, the crystals are separated sometimes by free spaces in which the residual fluids are concentrated," Prof Meunier explained.
"These fluids contain all the components that have not been consumed in the high-temperature crystals like pyroxene, olivine and plagioclase; and among these components, of course, there is water.
"As the temperature decreases, these fluids are supersaturated with a lot of phases that consume water and all the remaining elements. And this favours the formation of clay minerals."
What is more, when the team examined the infrared reflectance of the Mururoan lavas, they found the signal to be very similar to the observational data obtained by the Mars orbiters that have mapped the Red Planet's clay deposits.
Below the surface Prof John Mustard, of Brown University, Rhodes Island, US, has studied the satellite clay data extensively since its first acquisition in 2005.
He said the new research was a welcome addition to the debate about the early environmental conditions on the planet but that he was not convinced the Mururoan lavas could explain the great abundance of clays seen in some regions of the Red Planet.
"The question is: how do you generate thick sequences of this stuff? Their model cannot, I don't think, explain a Mawrth Vallis and other thick sections where we can quite clearly demonstrate many hundreds of metres, if not more, of clay formation. Mawrth Vallis has far too much clay to be produced by this process. The amount of clays produced by this degassing process is a relatively small amount."

The Curiosity rover will investigate clays at the foot of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater

Prof Mustard himself prefers the idea that many of the clays were produced sub-surface at Mars, where warm water could interact with rocks for long periods - such as in hydrothermal systems. Only later were these buried clays excavated into view by impacts or through the erosion of overlying ground by short-lived bursts of flowing surface water.
To maintain stable water on the surface of the planet for extended durations would have needed a thick atmosphere - something which is quite hard to reproduce in the climate models of early Mars, explained Prof Mustard.
"We make the clear argument that a good chunk of the clays were subsurface," he told BBC News.
"I think it's abundantly clear that surface hydrologic systems were probably responsible for a subset of the clay occurrences that we see - but not the dominance. There's very good evidence for there having been interconnected rivers and lakes, but they're very immature. This fluvial renaissance of Mars was very short-lived."
The debate is about to get lot more interesting thanks to the imminent first direct measurements of clay minerals on Mars.
Nasa has two operational rovers on the planet currently, and both should encounter the deposits.
The Opportunity vehicle is driving around the rim of a big crater known as Endeavour where clays have been sighted from orbit.
And the Curiosity robot, which has just landed in Gale Crater, will be commanded to drive to the base of a mountain where, again, clays have been detected by satellite.

 

NASA unveils Mars panorama taken by rover Opportunity

NASA has released a strikingly clear panoramic image of the surface of Mars taken by the agency's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during its fifth winter on the planet. During the four winter months, the rover stayed stationary because the low levels of sunlight did not provide adequate power for the craft to explore the planetary surface.
The false-color image was produced by combining 817 images taken between Dec. 21, 2011, and May 8, 2012, by the craft's panoramic camera, or Pancam. The solar panels at the left and right bottom of the image show an accumulation of dust since the craft landed on January 2004, which has further lowered the amount of energy produced by the panels.
Mars north is in the center of the image and the craft's solar panels are angled in that direction to capture the maximum amount of sunlight. The rover's tracks are clearly visible, including a turn in place. The tracks reveal darker soils underlying the thin, bright dust cover.
The rover is sitting on an outcrop called Greeley's Haven, named after Ronald Greeley, an Arizona State University astronomer who was a member of the Mars team who died in 2011. At the far left on the horizon is Rich Morris Hill, named after John R. "Rich" Morris, a JPL aerospace engineer and rover team member who also died in 2011.
The rover is managed by Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Talking Glasses by Google

By now, you’ve heard about Google: Project Glass.  This video shows what they will do when they become available next year and will be put into the hands of third-party developers some of whom may use the new wearable computer technology to journey where no one has gone.

 

Severn Suzuki speaking at UN Earth Summit 1992

After a week of torrid voting and much passionate support, along with a lot of gut-wrenching consideration and jostling during the judging round, I am proud to announce your Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2011: (By Innovation Excellence)


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Global Innovation Through Science & Technology