Posted on by Jason Major

Say Hello to Asteroid 2007 PA8

Radar images of asteroid 2007 PA8 acquired on October 28, 29 and 30. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Gemini)

Take a good look at asteroid 2007 PA8 — over the past week it was making its closest pass of Earth for the next 200 years… and NASA’s 230-foot (70-meter) -wide Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California snapped its picture as it went by.

All right, maybe no “pictures” were “snapped”… 2007 PA8 is a small, dark body that only came within four million miles (6.5 million kilometers) today, Nov. 5 (0.043 AU, or 17 times the distance from Earth to the Moon). But the radar capabilities of the Deep Space Network antenna in California’s Mojave Desert can bounce radar off even the darkest asteroids, obtaining data that can be used to create a detailed portrait.

In the image above, a composite of radar data acquired on October 28, 29 and 30, we can see the irregular shape of 2007 PA8 as it rotates slowly — only once every 3-4 days. The perspective is looking “down” at the 1-mile (1.6-km) -wide asteroid’s north pole, showing ridges and perhaps even some craters.

Although classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) by the IAU’s Minor Planet Center the trajectory of 2007 PA8 is well understood. It is not expected to pose any impact threat to Earth in the near or foreseeable future.

2007 PA8 was discovered by LINEAR on August 9, 2007.

Read more about asteroid radar imaging here, and find out more about asteroids at JPL’s Asteroid Watch site here.

Get more information on the known properties of 2007 PA8 here.

Source: NASA Solar System Exploration. Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Gemini

Posted on by Jason Major

Incredible Video of Sandy’s Swirling Progression

Just released, this mesmerizing animation was created by Kevin Ward from images acquired by NOAA’s GOES-O/14 satellite. It shows the progression of Hurricane Sandy, currently a Category 1 hurricane off the coast of the eastern U.S. that’s poised to make a devastating impact when its heavy rains, winds and storm surges strike the shores of many major metropolitan coastal areas — including New York City and Washington, D.C.

Nearly 12 hours of time are compressed into 30 seconds, revealing the evolution of Sandy as it churned over the Atlantic on Sunday, October 28.

 From NASA’s Earth Observatory’s YouTube page:
This time-lapse animation shows Hurricane Sandy from the vantage point of geostationary orbit—35,800 km (22,300 miles) above the Earth. The animation shows Sandy on October 28, 2012, from 7:15 to 6:26 EDT. Light from the changing angles of the sun highlight the structure of the clouds. The images were collected by NOAA’s GOES-14 satellite. The “super rapid scan” images — one every minute from 7:15 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. EDT — reveal details of the storm’s motion.

Launched by NASA as GOES-O on June 27, 2009, GOES-14 is now under control by the NOAA, keeping an eye on the mid-Atlantic region from a geostationary position approximately 22,300 miles (35,800 km) above the Earth.

Sandy is expected to bring up to 10 inches of rain into New York, with a surge possible over 6 feet above high tide and wind gusts in excess of 75 mph. Once the hurricane moves inland there could be millions left without electricity. States of emergency have already been declared in many areas within Sandy’s projected path.

Read: Hurricane Sandy Barreling to Eastern Seaboard, Menacing Millions

Currently Sandy is off the coast of North Carolina (at the time of this writing, 34.5 N / 70.5 W) moving northeast at 14 mph (22  km/h) with a low pressure of 950 mb… that’s as low or lower than some of the most powerful storms to hit the eastern U.S. over the past century, including the “perfect storm” of 1991 (a low system which also struck at Halloween) and the deadly 1938 “Great Hurricane”, which devastated coastal regions all across southern New England.

Stay up to date on Hurricane Sandy’s progress on the NOAA page here, with the latest public advisories being posted here.

NASA animation by Kevin Ward, using images from NOAA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies.

Posted on by Jason Major

NASA Satellite Sees Ghostly Remains of Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice

Sea ice swirls in ocean currents off the coast of Greenland (NASA/GSFC)

Spooky spectral swirls of last season’s sea ice drift in currents off the coast of eastern Greenland in this image from NASA’s Aqua satellite, acquired on October 17. Although sea ice in the Arctic will start forming again after September’s record low measurements, these ghostly wisps are likely made up of already-existing ice that has migrated south.

As global temperatures rise — both over land and in the ocean — thinner sea ice builds up during the Arctic winter and thus more of it melts during the summer, a pattern that will eventually lead to an ice-free Arctic if trends continue. The past several years saw sea ice in the Arctic below the 1979-2000 average, with this past September displaying the lowest volumes yet recorded.

The graph below, made from data modeled by the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, show the chilling — or, perhaps, not-so-chilling — results of this century’s recent observations.

Along Greenland’s east coast, the Fram Strait serves as an expressway for sea ice moving out of the Arctic Ocean. The movement of ice through the strait used to be offset by the growth of ice in the Beaufort Gyre.

Until the late 1990s, ice would persist in the gyre for years, growing thicker and more resistant to melt. Since the start of the twenty-first century, however, ice has been less likely to survive its trip through the southern part of the Beaufort Gyre. As a result, less Arctic sea ice has been able to pile up and form multi-year ice.

Thin, free-drifting ice — as seen above — moves very easily with winds and currents.

Aqua is a NASA Earth Science satellite mission named for the large amount of information that the mission is collecting about the Earth’s water cycle, including evaporation from the oceans, water vapor in the atmosphere, clouds, precipitation, soil moisture, sea ice, land ice, and snow cover on the land and ice. Aqua was launched on May 4, 2002, and carries six Earth-observing instruments in a near-polar low-Earth orbit. MODIS, which acquired the image above, is a 36-band spectroradiometer that measures physical properties of the atmosphere, oceans and land.

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Graph by Jesse Allen based on modeled ice volume data from the Polar Science Center, University of Washington. Caption portions by Michon Scott with information from Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Posted on by John Williams

Stirred, Not Shaken. Black Hole Antics Puff Up Whopper of a Galaxy

Its massive gravitational field warping space, the huge elliptical galaxy A2261-BCG, seems to have a diffuse halo of stars instead of a bright central galactic core. Image credit: NASA/ESA Hubble

Bloated far beyond the size of normal galaxies, one or more black holes may have puffed up an elliptical galaxy to a whopping size, according to astronomers. To their surprise, however, the black holes are missing.

Normally, scientists measure a concentrated peak of light surrounding the central black hole surrounded by a fuzzy halo of stars. Instead, astronomers, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, find that the galaxy, known as A2261-BCG, is just a diffuse, bloated foggy patch of light. The intensity of starlight remains even across the entire galaxy. Past Hubble observations show supermassive black holes, each weighing billions of times more than our Sun, reside at the cores of nearly all galaxies.

“Expecting to find a black hole in every galaxy is sort of like expecting to find a pit inside a peach,” explained astronomer and co-author Tod Lauer in a press release. Lauer is with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. “With this Hubble observation, we cut into the biggest peach and we can’t find the pit. We don’t know for sure that the black hole is not there, but Hubble shows that there’s no concentration of stars in the core.”

So where are the black holes?

Astronomers, in a paper that appeared in the September 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, have two ideas, both involving galactic billiards, for the galaxy’s puffy appearance. In one scenario, a pair of merging black holes gravitationally stir up then scatter the galaxy’s stars. In another, the merging black holes are ejected leaving the swarm of stars with no gravitational anchor allowing them to wander outward.

Galaxy cores tend to be sized proportionally to the wheeling expanse of the host galaxy. In the case of A2261-BCG, which spans about a million light-years (10 times that of our Milky Way Galaxy), the central region is three times larger than other very luminous galaxies, according to the paper. The monster galaxy is the most massive and brightest galaxy in the Abell 2261 galaxy cluster.

Team leader Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., said in the press release that the galaxy stood out in the Hubble image. “When I first saw the image of this galaxy, I knew right away it was unusual,” Postman explained. “The core was very diffuse and very large. The challenge was then to make sense of all the data, given what we knew from previous Hubble observations, and come up with a plausible explanation for the intriguing nature of this particular galaxy.”

The team admits the ejected black-hole ideas sound far-fetched, “but that’s what makes observing the universe so intriguing — sometimes you find the unexpected,” said Postman.

As a follow-up, the team is searching for the sound of material falling into the black hole using the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico. Comparing the VLA data with Hubble images will allow the researchers to confirm the existence of a black hole and map its location.

Source: Hubblesite

Posted on by Jason Major

Exploded Rocket Fragments Could Endanger ISS and Future Missions

The International Space Station will have to look out for new debris from an exploded Russian rocket (NASA image)

Traveling through low-Earth orbit just got a little more dangerous; a drifting Russian Breeze M (Briz-M) rocket stage that failed to execute its final burns back on August 6 has recently exploded, sending hundreds of shattered fragments out into orbit.

Russia and the U.S. Defense Department (JFCC-Space) have stated that they are currently tracking 500 pieces of debris from the disintegrated Breeze M, although some sources are saying there are likely much more than that.

After a successful liftoff via Proton rocket on August 6 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Breeze M upper stage’s engines shut off after only 7 seconds as opposed to the normal 18 minutes, leaving its fuel tanks filled with 10 to 15 tons of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants. Its payloads, the Indonesian Telkom 3 and the Russian Express-MD2 communications satellites, were subsequently deployed into the wrong orbits as the Breeze M computer continued functioning.

Although originally expected to remain intact for at least another year, the rocket stage “violently disintegrated” on October 16. Evidence of the explosion was first observed by astronomer Robert McNaught at Australia’s Siding Springs Observatory, who counted 70 fragments visible within the narrow field-of-view telescope he was using for near-Earth asteroid observations.

The exact cause of the explosion isn’t known — it may have been sparked by an impact with another piece of space junk or the result of stresses caused by the Breeze M’s eccentric orbit, which varied in altitude from 265 to 5,015 kilometers (165 miles to 3,118 miles) with an inclination of 49.9 degrees.

This was the third such breakup of a partially-full Breeze M upper stage in orbit, the previous events having occurred in 2007 and 2010, and yet another Breeze M still remains in orbit after a failed burn in August 2011.

Most of the latest fragments are still in orbit at altitudes ranging from 250 to 5,000 km (155 to 3,100 miles), where they are expected to remain.

“Although some of the pieces have begun to re-enter, most of the debris will remain in orbit for an extended period of time.”

– Jamie Mannina, US State Department spokesperson

According to NASA the debris currently poses no immediate threat to the Space Station although the cloud is “believed not to be insignificant.” Still, according to a post on Zarya.com the Station’s course will periodically take it within the Breeze M debris cloud, and “will sometimes spend several days at a time with a large part of its orbit within the cloud.”

Source: RT.com and SpaceflightNow.com.  Inset image: the Breeze M (Briz-M) upper stage which disintegrated on Oct. 16. (Khrunichev)

Posted on by Ken Kremer

Gorgeous Glenelg – ‘Promised Land’ Panorama on Mars

Image Caption: Panoramic mosaic shows gorgeous Glenelg snapped by Curiosity on Sol 64 (Oct. 10) with eroded crater rim and base of Mount Sharp in the distance. This is a cropped version of the full mosaic as assembled from 75 images acquired by the Mastcam 100 camera. See full mosaic below. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

NASA’s 1 ton mega rover Curiosity is simultaneously eating Martian dirt and busily snapping hundreds of critical high resolution color photos of her surroundings at the gorgeous locale of tasty terrain of outcrops the scientists call the ‘Promised Land’ – a place that will help unveil the watery mysteries of ancient Mars.

11 weeks into Curiosity’s 2 year primary mission she finds herself at a spot dubbed Glenelg – her first major science destination – and which lies at the natural junction of three types of geologically varied terrain.

See our detailed color panoramic mosaics of the road ahead inside Glenelg as the robot methodically scans around at the inviting mix of geologic features never before investigated by a robotic emissary from Earth.

Glenelg offers an unprecedented opportunity for a boon of discoveries to the rover science team long before she arrives at her ultimate destination – the 3.4 mile (5.5 km) high layered mountain named Mount Sharp.

Image Caption: Panoramic mosaic shows gorgeous Glenelg snapped by Curiosity from Rocknest windblown dune on Sol 64 (Oct. 10) with eroded crater rim and base of Mount Sharp in the distance. This mosaic as assembled from 75 images acquired by the high resolution Mastcam 100 camera on Sol 64. Click to enlarge. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

Image Caption: Panorama shows beautiful vista of distant eroded rim of Gale Crater and breathtaking foreground terrain. This mosaic was assembled from high resolution Mastcam 100 images taken by Curiosity on Sol 50 (Sep. 26). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger scientist explained to me that the team is using the Mastcam 100 imagery to come up with options for the upcoming driving and exploration plan to be carried out over at least the next few weeks.

“We are at Glenelg and consider ourselves to be in the ‘Promised Land’. We took the images in the direction we will be traveling,” said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology during a media teleconference on Oct. 18.

“We mostly see outcrops there and that’s the reason we took those prioritized images,” he said about the Mastcam 100 imagery from Sols 64 and 66.

“These images will help guide us and give the team options in terms of what I am calling ‘tours’. The team comes up with hypothesis based on the images about observations they would like to make and where they would like to drive.”.

“Then we will integrate the different observations to come up with a model we hope for how the Glenelg area was put together geologically. And then that will inform ultimately our selection for which rock to drill into for the first time,” explained Grotzinger.

Image Caption: Curiosity scoops up Martian soil sample on Sol 66 (Oct 12. 2012). Navcam camera image mosaic shows the robotic arm at work during scooping operations. Curiosity later delivered the first soil sample to the circular CheMin sample inlet at the center on the rover deck. Tiny trenches measure about 1.8 inches (4.5 centimeters) wide. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

Image caption: Three bite marks left in the Martian ground by the scoop on the robotic arm of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity are visible in this image taken by the rover’s right Navigation Camera during the mission’s 69th Martian day, or sol (Oct. 15, 2012). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Curiosity is currently parked at a windblown ripple named ‘Rocknest’. It afforded the perfect type of dusty martian material to first test out the scoop and clean the sample processing system twice before finally inhaling the first sample of Martian sand into the robots Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) analytical instrument several sols ago to determine what minerals it contains.

Results from the Red Planet soil poured into the CheMin experiment located on the rover’s deck are expected in the coming week or so.

Tosol is Sol 75. Curiosity has taken nearly 20,000 pictures so far and driven a total distance of about 1,590 feet (484 meters).

Ken Kremer

See more of our Curiosity Mars mosaics by Ken Kremer & Marco Di Lorenzo at NBC News Cosmic log

…..
Nov. 16: Free Public Lecture by Ken Kremer about “Curiosity and the Search for Life in 3 D” and more at Union County College and Amateur Astronomers Inc in Cranford, NJ.

Posted on by John Williams

Surprise! Galaxies Still Evolving in Present Universe

A giant spiral of gas dust and stars, Messier 101 spans 170,000 light-years and contains more than a trillion stars. Astronomers have uncovered a surprising trend in galaxy evolution where galaxies like M101 and the Milky Way Galaxy continued to develop into settled disk galaxies long after previously thought. Credit: NASA/ESA Hubble

Graceful in their turnings, spiral galaxies were thought to have reached their current state billions of years ago. A study of hundreds of galaxies, however, upsets that notion revealing that spiral galaxies, like the Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way, have continued to change.

“Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into their present form by about 8 billion years ago, with little additional development since,” said Susan Kassin, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the study’s lead researcher in a press release. “The trend we’ve observed instead shows the opposite, that galaxies were steadily changing over this time period.”

A study of 544 star-forming galaxies observed by the Earth-based Keck and Hubble Space Telescope shows that disk galaxies like our Milky Way Galaxy unexpectedly reached their current state long after much of the universe’s star formation had ceased. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Astronomers used the twin 10-meter earth-bound W.M. Keck Observatory atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study 544 star-forming galaxies. Farther back in time, galaxies tend to be very different, say astronomers, with random and disorganized motions. Nearer to the present, star-forming galaxies look like well-ordered disk-shaped systems. Rotation in these galaxies trumps other internal, random motions. These galaxies are gradually settling into well-behaved disks with the most massive galaxies always showing higher organization.

This plot shows the fractions of settled disk galaxies in four time spans, each about 3 billion years long. There is a steady shift toward higher percentages of settled galaxies closer to the present time. At any given time, the most massive galaxies are the most settled. More distant and less massive galaxies on average exhibit more disorganized internal motions, with gas moving in multiple directions, and slower rotation speeds. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The sampling of galaxies studied, from the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe 2 (DEEP2) Redshift Survey, ranged between 2 billion and 8 billion light-years from Earth with masses between 0.3 percent to 100 percent that of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Researchers looked at all galaxies in this time range with emission lines bright enough to determine internal motions. Researchers focused on emission lines characteristically emitted by gas within the galaxy. The emission lines not only tell scientists about the elements that make up the galaxies but also red shifting of emission lines contains information on the internal motions and distance.

“Previous studies removed galaxies that did not look like the well-ordered rotating disks now common in the universe today,” said co-author Benjamin Weiner, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “By neglecting them, these studies examined only those rare galaxies in the distant universe that are well-behaved and concluded that galaxies didn’t change.”

In the past 8 billion years, mergers between galaxies, both large and small, has decreased. So has the overall rate of star formation and associated disruptions due to supernovae explosions. Both factors may play a role in the newly found trend, say scientists.

The Milky Way Galaxy may have gone through the same chaotic growing and changing as the galaxies in the DEEP2 sample before settling into its present state at just about the same time the Sun and Earth were forming, say team scientists. By observing the pattern, astronomers can now adjust computer simulations of galaxy evolution until they replicate the observations. Then the hunt will be on to determine the physical processes responsible for the trend.

This cosmological simulation follows the development of a single disk galaxy throughout the life of the Universe; about 13.5 billion years. Red colors show old stars, young stars show as white and bright blue while the distribution of gas shows as a pale blue. The computer-generated view spans about 300,000 light-years. The simulation, running on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, took about 1 million CPU hours to complete. Credit: F. Governato and T. Quinn (Univ. of Washington), A. Brooks (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison), and J. Wadsley (McMaster Univ.).

A paper detailing the findings will be published in the October 20, 2012 The Astrophysical Journal.

Source: NASA

Posted on by Jason Major

Our Gorgeous, Graceful, Gradient Sun

Here’s a mesmerizing video from the folks over at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s visualization studio showing the Sun in a whole new light… well, a reprocessed light anyway.

Using what’s called a gradient filter, images of the Sun can be adjusted to highlight the intricate details of its dynamic atmosphere. Magnetic activity that’s invisible to human vision can be brought into view, showing the powerful forces in play within the Sun’s corona and helping researchers better understand how it affects space weather. (Plus they sure are pretty!)

Compiled into a video, these images reveal the hidden beauty — and power — of our home star in action.

Video courtesy NASA/GSFC

Posted on by John Williams

Monster Black Holes Lurk at the Edge of Time

The reddish object in this infrared image is ULASJ1234+0907, located about 11 billion light-years from Earth. The red color comes from vast amounts of dust, which absorbs bluer light, and obscures the supermassive black hole from view in visible wavelengths. Credit: image created using data from UKIDSS and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) observatory.

As if staring toward the edge of the Universe weren’t fascinating enough, scientists at the University of Cambridge say they see enormous, rapidly growing supermassive black holes barely detectable near the edge of time.

Thick dust shrouds the monster black holes but they emit vast amounts of radiation through violent interactions and collisions with their host galaxies making them visible in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The team published their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The most remote object in the study lies at a whopping 11 billion light-years from Earth. Ancient light from the supermassive black hole, named ULASJ1234+0907 and located toward the constellation of Virgo, the Maiden, has traveled (at almost 10 trillion kilometers, or 6 million million miles, per year) across the cosmos for nearly the estimated age of the Universe. The monster black hole is more than 10 billion times the mass of our Sun and 10,000 times more massive than the black hole embedded in the Milky Way Galaxy; making it one of the most massive black holes ever seen. And it’s not alone. Researchers say that there may be as many as 400 giants black holes in the tiny sliver of the Universe that we can observe.

“These results could have a significant impact on studies of supermassive black holes” said Dr Manda Banerji, lead author of the paper, in a press release. “Most black holes of this kind are seen through the matter they drag in. As the neighbouring material spirals in towards the black holes, it heats up. Astronomers are able to see this radiation and observe these systems.”

The team from Cambridge used infrared surveys being carried out on the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) to peer through the dust and locate the giant black holes for the first time.

“These results are particularly exciting because they show that our new infrared surveys are finding super massive black holes that are invisible in optical surveys,” says Richard McMahon, co-author of the study. “These new quasars are important because we may be catching them as they are being fed through collisions with other galaxies. Observations with the new Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile will allow us to directly test this picture by detecting the microwave frequency radiation emitted by the vast amounts of gas in the colliding galaxies.”

Huge black holes are known to reside at the centers of all galaxies. Astronomers predict the most massive of these cosmic phenomena grow through violent collisions with other galaxies. Galactic interactions trigger star formation which provides more fuel for black holes to devour. And it’s during this process that thick layers of dust hide the munching black holes.

“Although these black holes have been studied for some time,” says Banergi, “the new results indicate that some of the most massive ones may have so far been hidden from our view. The newly discovered black holes, devouring the equivalent of several hundred Suns every year, will shed light on the physical processes governing the growth of all supermassive black holes.”

Astronomers compare the extreme case of ULASJ1234+0907 with the relatively nearby and well-studied Markarian 231. Markarian 231, found just 600 million light-years away, appears to have recently undergone a violent collision with another galaxy producing an example of a dusty, growing black hole in the local Universe. By contrast, the more extreme example of ULASJ1234+0907, shows scientists that conditions in the early Universe were more turbulent and inhospitable than today.

Source: Royal Astronomical Society

Image Credit: Markarian 231, an example of a galaxy with a dusty rapidly growing supermassive black hole located 600 million light years from Earth. The bright source at the center of the galaxy marks the black hole while rings of gas and dust can be seen around it as well as “tidal tails” left over from a recent impact with another galaxy. Courtesy of NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Posted on by Ken Kremer

Scooping Mars – Shaken Not Stirred ! – Color Video

Image Caption: Scooping Mars at ‘Rocknest’ mosaic shows a before and after view of the spot where Curiosity dug up her 1st Martian soil sample on Sol 61 (Oct 7. 2012). Navcam camera mosaic at left shows the arm at work during scooping operations. Image at right shows the tiny scooped trench measuring about 1.8 inches (4.5 centimeters) wide. See NASA JPL scooped sample vibration video below. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

“Here’s the scoop: I like my regolith shaken!” tweeted NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover a short while ago in a nod to the 50th anniversary of the premiere of the 1st James Bond action flick.

And the “proof” is in the video as they say. See below a short NASA video clip showing the 1st Martian material collected using the small table spoon sized scoop on Curiosity’s robotic arm and subsequently being vibrated inside the scoop after it was lifted from the ground of Gale Crater this past weekend on Sol 61, Oct. 7, 2012.

Scooping Mars at ‘Rocknest’ mosaic above shows a before and after view of the spot where Curiosity was working at on Sol 61.

“So excited to dig in! One scoop of regolith ripple, coming right up!” she tweeted in the midst of the action.


Video Caption: This 256 frame video clip of Mastcam images shows the 1st sample of Martian material being vibrated inside Curiosity’s table spoon sized scoop on Oct. 7, 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Yeah baby ! Just as the rover’s science and engineers announced last week, the 6 wheeled mega robot Curiosity scored a major success by scooping up her very first sample of windblown Martian sand from the ‘Rocknest’ ripple she arrived at just last week.

The plan ahead is to use the collected “Red Planet” material to cleanse the interior of the rover’s sample-handling system of a residual layer of oily contamination of “Home Planet” material that could interfere with unambiguously interpreting the results.

For sure the science team doesn’t want any false positives with respect to any potential detection of the long sought organic compounds that could shed light on whether a habitant supporting Martian microbes ever existed in the past or present.

The newly collected material will be vibrated at 8 G’s and then be fed into Curiosity’s Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) device on the robotic arm turret.

Curiosity’s motorized scoop measures 1.8 inches (4.5 centimeters) wide, 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) long. The images reveal the scoop left behind a small hole about 1.8 inches (4.5 centimeters) wide.

Image Caption: Sol 61 Navcam raw image shows the hole dug up by Curioisty’s scoop on Oct. 7, 2012 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Image Caption: Mastcam 100 telephoto close up image of Rocknest trench on Sol 61. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

At last week’s Oct. 4 media briefing, the rover team said they would make three deliveries of scooped soil to cleanse out the sample acquisition system over the next two week or so before pouring sieved Mars material into the SAM and Chemin analytical chemistry labs on the rover’s deck for detailed evaluation of the elemental and mineralogical composition.

Ken Kremer