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Moon Begins Spilling Secrets |
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Written by Irene Klotz - Discovery News space correspondent
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Friday, 25 September 2009 |
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NASA' s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has settled into a circular 31-mile-high orbit around the moon to begin mapping the surface and looking for minerals. Scientists have been expecting to find hydrogen,  which may mean there is frozen water on the moon. But if the early results are an indication of what is to come, the mission may end up generating more questions than it answers. For starters, LRO has indeed found hydrogen, but some of the locations where it has turned up are places that, on the surface anyway, are not cold enough for ice to exist. "There is hydrogen near the lunar south polar region," LRO scientist Richard Vondrak told reporters yesterday, but added that it is not confined to craters that never see sunlight. Those shadowed craters turn out to be among the coldest places in solar system, with temperatures just 33 degrees above absolute zero, or minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. |
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A Snowball's Chance on Mars (Better Than You Think!) |
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Written by Irene Klotz - Discovery News space correspondent
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Friday, 25 September 2009 |
 If you think that a snowball’s chance on Mars is roughly the same as one in the mythical netherworld, park your eyes on this:
It’s ice in the pit of a Martian crater. The pictures were taken by NASA’s sharp-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which found highly pure, bright ice in five newly formed craters. Scientists had been comparing MRO images to look for changes, particularly dark marks associated with meteorite impacts. “We saw something very unusual -- this bright blue material poking up from the bottom of the crater. It looked a lot like water ice. And sure enough, when we started monitoring this material, it faded away like you'd expect water ice to fade,” said Shane Byrne, with the University of Arizona. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 25 September 2009 )
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Precise Radio-Telescope Measurements Advance Frontier Of Gravitational Physics |
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Written by ScienceDaily
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Thursday, 03 September 2009 |
Sun's path in sky in front of quasars, 2005. (Credit: Image courtesy of National Radio Astronomy Observatory) ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2009) — Scientists using a continent-wide array of radio telescopes have made an extremely precise measurement of the curvature of space caused by the Sun's gravity, and their technique promises a major contribution to a frontier area of basic physics. "Measuring the curvature of space caused by gravity is one of the most sensitive ways to learn how Einstein's theory of General Relativity relates to quantum physics. Uniting gravity theory with quantum theory is a major goal of 21st-Century physics, and these astronomical measurements are a key to understanding the relationship between the two," said Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri. |
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