Category: Moon

[/caption]
The moon’s “near side” always faces Earth, because the moon spins once on its axis in precisely the same amount of time it takes to revolve around the Earth. But things could have been different billions of years ago. A computer analysis of the amount of craters on the different hemispheres of the Moon shows that the far side may have once been facing Earth. A large asteroid impact may have caused the moon to change the way its faces Earth.

One consequence of the Moon being locked in a spin-orbit resonance of synchronous rotation is that more impacts should occur on the Moon’s western hemisphere than the eastern, as that side would be facing into orbit, making it more likely to be hit by debris.

But Mark Wieczorek and Matthieu Le Feuvre at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics in France compared the relative ages of the craters, using data about the sequence in which ejected material was deposited on the surface, and they found the opposite to be true. Although the youngest impact basins were concentrated in the western hemisphere, as expected, the older craters were mostly congregated in the east. This suggests that the eastern face had once been bombarded more than the western face.

This could have happened if a large asteroid impact caused the moon to do an about face. The researchers estimate after the impact, the moon would have appeared to turn slowly as viewed from Earth, and slowly would have come into its current position.

In looking at several of the largest lunar impact basins, there are several suspects for impacts that could have temporarily unlocked the Moon from synchronous rotation.

“We show that there is less than a 2% probability that the oldest lunar impact basins are randomly distributed across the lunar surface,” the researchers say. “Furthermore, these basins are preferentially located near the Moon’s antapex of motion, and this configuration has less than a 0.3% probability of occurring by chance.”

The team studied the relative age and distribution of 46 known craters. Wieczorek says the Chandrayaan-1 or Kaguya orbiters could provide information on more craters that would help in further research in this area.

For more information, see the abstract.

Sources: New Scientist

[/caption]
Back in the 1960’s and ’70’s when scientists claimed that the Moon rocks returned by the Apollo astronauts would keep researchers busy for decades, they weren’t kidding. Analysis on one of the rocks collected during the Apollo 17 mission has helped to solve a longstanding puzzle about the Moon. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) carried out the most detailed analysis ever of the oldest pristine rock from the Apollo collection. Magnetic traces recorded in the rock provide strong evidence that 4.2 billion years ago the moon had a liquid core with a dynamo, like Earth’s core today, that produced a strong magnetic field.

Until the Apollo Moon missions, many scientists were convinced the moon was born cold and stayed cold, never melting enough to form a liquid core. Apollo proved that there had been massive flows of lava on the moon’s surface, but the idea that it has, or ever had, a molten core remained controversial. “People have been vociferously debating this for 30 years,” said Ben Weiss, Assistant Professor of Planetary Sciences in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and senior author of a paper on the new finding being published in Science on Jan. 16.

Many of the rocks returned from the Moon had magnetic qualities, which was perplexing to scientists. How could Moon rocks be magnetic if the Moon had no magnetic core?

One rock in particular was compelling. The rock was collected on Apollo 17, the last Apollo mission to the moon, by Harrison “Jack” Schmidt, the only geologist ever to walk on the moon. “Many people think that it’s the most interesting lunar rock,” said Weiss.

The team studied faint magnetic traces in a small sample of the rock in great detail. Using a commercial rock magnetometer that was specially fitted with an automated robotic system to take many readings “allowed us to make an order of magnitude more measurements than previous studies of lunar samples,” Garrick-Bethell said. “This permitted us to study the magnetization of the rock in much greater detail than previously possible.”

And those data enabled them to rule out the other possible sources of the magnetic traces, such as magnetic fields briefly generated by huge impacts on the moon, which are very short-lived. But the evidence written in the lunar rock showed it must have remained in a magnetic environment for a long period of time — millions of years — and thus the field had to have come from a long-lasting magnetic dynamo.

That’s not a new idea, but it has been “one of the most controversial issues in lunar science,” Weiss said.
The magnetic field necessary to have magnetized this rock would have been about one-fiftieth as strong as Earth’s is today, Weiss said. “This is consistent with dynamo theory,” and also fits in with the prevailing theory that the moon was born when a Mars-sized body crashed into the Earth and blasted much of its crust into space, where it clumped together to form the moon.

The new finding underscores how much we still don’t know about our nearest neighbor in space, and which will soon be visited by humans once again under current NASA plans. “While humans have visited the moon six times, we have really only scratched the surface when it comes to our understanding of this world,” said Garick-Bethell.

Source: MIT

[/caption]
Ice on the moon or no ice? That is the question. It’s long been thought that water ice could be hiding in deep, dark craters near the Moon’s poles. However in October, 2008 Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft took the best look yet inside the Shackelton Crater at the lunar south pole and didn’t see anything resembling ice, dashing hopes for an abundant water source for future colonists on the moon. But now a team of researchers have re-analyzed data from NASA’s 1998 Lunar Prospector mission – the spacecraft that deliberately took a kamikaze nose-dive into the moon hoping to create a visible ice plume, which it didn’t. But researchers from Glasgow and Durham Universities in the UK say that a new look at old data shows polar craters that are shaded from the sun could have ice in concentrations of up to 10 grams for each kilogram of rock.

The Lunar Prospector’s Neutron Spectrometer (NS) instrument had detected large quantities of hydrogen around the Moon’s north and south pole, but the spacecraft’s crash into the surface didn’t create the plume of ice that scientists had hoped for to prove that ice was actually present.

The latest research of the Lunar Prospector probe’s data is being used to pinpoint likely locations of water ice.

If water ice is actually there, it should be stable for billions of years on the moon provided that it receives no sunlight.

“If the hydrogen is present as water ice then our results imply that the top meter of the moon holds about 200 billion litres of water,” Teodoro added.

However the researchers also say that instead of being water ice, hydrogen may be present in the form of protons fired from the sun into the dusty lunar surface.

The research is of interest for NASA’s upcoming LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite), part of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to be launched in 2009, and another impactor mission. Dr. Richard Elphic, in the Planetary Systems Branch, NASA Ames Research Center, said “LCROSS aims to liberate water by impacting into permanently shadowed polar terrain where ice may exist, and our improved maps of hydrogen abundance can help LCROSS select a promising impact site.

“These maps will also help focus LRO’s search for possible polar ice by identifying hydrogen-rich locales.”

If the LCROSS mission doesn’t definitively answer the ice question, it’s very likely we won’t know if water ice is on the moon until we go there ourselves and dig.

The findings from the UK team are published in the scientific journal Icarus.

Source: BBC, Science Daily

[/caption]
Everybody wants to go to the moon! Scientists from Korea recently unveiled a spacecraft developed completely in-house that could potentially be used for robotic exploration of the Moon. The mini-sized lander, shown above is about 40 centimeters tall (15.5 inches) and weighs 25 kilograms (55lbs). Scientists say it carry an additional 20 kilograms in payloads to the surface. Every part of the rocket engine was “homemade,” said Kwon Se-jin, a professor of aerospace engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The lander, the result of a six year long effort, represents an advancement in technology, and an important step for Korea’s nascent space program.

The rocket’s propulsion includes a state-of-the-art propulsion and the engine’s design allows it to be powered by environmentally friendly fuel. Also, the Korean team was proud of the low costs associated with their new lander.

According to Kwon, lunar modules between the 100 and 200 kilogram range, developed by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) under the International Lunar Network (ILN) project costs around $100 million. The rocket engine created by his team could cut development costs to about half that, Kwon claimed.

“We have approached NASA over the possibilities of using our engine,” Kwon said, adding that his team is collaborating with other local scientists with the goal of landing a spacecraft on the moon by 2013.

“Lunar-landers are critical in developing lunar spacecraft, but advanced nations have been careful to protect their core technologies, so I think this is a big deal for us,” he said.

South Korea has been pushing an aggressive space program over the past decade, and objectives include having a man on the moon by 2020.

Korea’s current plans are to launch an Earth-orbiting satellite in early 2009 from a newly built spaceport. If successfully, Korea would become the ninth country to launch a satellite from its own soil.

But the Koreans also want to become part of an international space research project, the ILN, a project aiming to gradually place six to eight fixed or mobile science stations on the lunar surface. The stations will form a robotic network to replace the hardware left by the Apollo program to continue studies of the moon’s surface and interior.

Source: Korea Times

[/caption]

Earlier this week we had a story about old data from the Apollo missions that could potentially be lost if an “antique” computer from the 1960’s can’t be renovated. But now comes good news about more old data which has actually been restored and enhanced to an exceedingly high quality. Some of the first ever close-up images of the lunar landscape have been given new life, rivaling the images being taken by today’s high definition cameras. NASA and some private space business leaders spent a quarter million dollars rescuing the historic photos from early NASA lunar robotic probes and restoring them in an abandoned McDonald’s. The first refurbished image was released Thursday, a 42-year old classic image of the moon with Earth rising in the background.

In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five Lunar Orbiter missions to photograph the surface of the moon to prepare for the Apollo missions to land humans on the lunar surface. Data were recorded on large magnetic tapes and transferred to photographic film for scientific analysis. When these images were first retrieved from lunar orbit, only a portion of their true resolution was available because of the limited technology available. A special machine was needed to just to view the images.

Initially, the moon pictures were the hit of the 1960s. The photo released Thursday was the first of Earth from a great distance, until it was outdone by Apollo 8 astronauts, the first to orbit the moon. And a 1966 close-up of the moon was hailed by some media as the “picture of the century.”

After the Apollo missions, with all the images taken by the astronauts, the Lunar Orbiter images were essentially forgotten. The tapes with the images were put in storage. The specialized machines were offered free to anyone who would haul them away.

Nancy Evans, co-founder of the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) took a couple machines in order to make sure the data taken by the Lunar Orbiters wasn’t lost. For a time in the 1980’s Evans worked on digitizing the images, but when funding dried up, the drives sat in a barn in Sun Valley, CA for the next several decades.

In 2007, Nancy Evans tried to find someone to take the drives. Dennis Wingo, a private space entrepreneur heard about this and contacted Keith Cowing from NASA Watch. Wingo and Cowing subsequently obtained the drives and tapes. They took over a shuttered McDonald’s at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and patched together one working machine to read the tapes, used in combination with today’s software.

Future images will be made publically available when they are fully processed and calibrated. The intent of this project is to facilitate, wherever possible, the broadest dissemination and public use of these images.

“This is an incredible image,” said Wingo. “In terms of raw resolution, there has been no mission that has flown since or even today that is as good.”

With one photo down, there are 1,983 more to go, if the machine holds up, Wingo said.

These photos will have some use, said Cowing. When NASA launches its the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in the spring, the space agency can compare detailed high-resolution images from 1966 to 2009 and see what changes occurred in 43 years, he said.

“What this gives you is literally before and after photos,” Cowing said. “This is like a time machine.”

For more information see NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project and MoonViews.com. Here are some Apollo 13 pictures.

Sources: NASA Watch, AP, NASA