Fast Neutral Hydrogen Detected Coming From The Moon

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer has made the first detection of neutral atoms coming from the Moon (background image). The color-coded data toward the bottom shows the neutral particles and geometry measured at the Moon on Dec. 3, 2008. IBEX spins at four rotations per minute with its field of view sweeping over the moon each spin over about 10 hours. The neutral atoms are summed in 6 degree bins with the lunar direction indicated by the white arrow. IBEX detects particles produced by reflection and neutralization of the incident solar wind protons at toward the spacecraft. The Earth, moon and spacecraft shown toward the top are not to scale. (Credit: Image courtesy of Southwest Research Institute)

ScienceDaily (July 5, 2009) — NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of very fast hydrogen atoms coming from the moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence.

During spacecraft commissioning, the IBEX team turned on the IBEX-Hi instrument, built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which measures atoms with speeds from about half a million to 2.5 million miles per hour. Its companion sensor, IBEX-Lo, built by Lockheed Martin, the University of New Hampshire, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the University of Bern in Switzerland, measures atoms with speeds from about one hundred thousand to 1.5 million mph.

"Just after we got IBEX-Hi turned on, the moon happened to pass right through its field of view, and there they were," says Dr. David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division. "The instrument lit up with a clear signal of the neutral atoms being detected as they backscattered from the moon."

The solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles that flows out from the sun, moves out into space in every direction at speeds of about a million mph. The Earth's strong magnetic field shields our planet from the solar wind. The moon, with its relatively weak magnetic field, has no such protection, causing the solar wind to slam onto the moon's sunward side.

From its vantage point in space, IBEX sees about half of the moon -- one quarter of it is dark and faces the nightside (away from the sun), while the other quarter faces the dayside (toward the sun). Solar wind particles impact only the dayside, where most of them are embedded in the lunar surface, while some scatter off in different directions. The scattered ones mostly become neutral atoms in this reflection process by picking up electrons from the lunar surface.

The IBEX team estimates that only about 10 percent of the solar wind ions reflect off the sunward side of the moon as neutral atoms, while the remaining 90 percent are embedded in the lunar surface. Characteristics of the lunar surface, such as dust, craters and rocks, play a role in determining the percentage of particles that become embedded and the percentage of neutral particles, as well as their direction of travel, that scatter.

McComas says the results also shed light on the "recycling" process undertaken by particles throughout the solar system and beyond. The solar wind and other charged particles impact dust and larger objects as they travel through space, where they backscatter and are reprocessed as neutral atoms. These atoms can travel long distances before they are stripped of their electrons and become ions and the complicated process begins again.

The combined scattering and neutralization processes now observed at the moon have implications for interactions with objects across the solar system, such as asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects and other moons. The plasma-surface interactions occurring within protostellar nebula, the region of space that forms around planets and stars -- as well as exoplanets, planets around other stars -- also can be inferred.

IBEX's primary mission is to observe and map the complex interactions occurring at the edge of the solar system, where the million miles per hour solar wind runs into the interstellar material from the rest of the galaxy. The spacecraft carries the most sensitive neutral atom detectors ever flown in space, enabling researchers to not only measure particle energy, but also to make precise images of where they are coming from.

Around the end of the summer, the team will release the spacecraft's first all-sky map showing the energetic processes occurring at the edge of the solar system. The team will not comment until the image is complete, but McComas hints, "It doesn't look like any of the models."

IBEX is the latest in NASA's series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers spacecraft. The IBEX mission was developed by SwRI with a national and international team of partners. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the Explorers Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

Read the whole article on Science Daily

Magnetic field on bright star Vega

The star Vega, in the constellation of Lyra, roughly 26 light years distant from us.
This is a two minute expsoure using a Canon EOS 350d SLR through my 200mm aperture Newtonian reflector telescope attached to a motor driven equatorial mount, 35mm efl = 1.6 metres!
This star was made "famous" by the 1997 motion picture "Contact", starring Jodie Foster, which was based on a novel by the late Carl Sagan, who was a very accomplished cosmologist.
In the movie, TV signals from 52 years ago are detected which are in fact signals replayed to us by an another civilisation. The movie rightly makes the point that our TV signals took 26 years to get to Vega and another 26 years to come back!
The point being, that even if we could travel at the speed of light (which we are a long long long way from doing), it would take 26 years to get to Vega.
The sad thing is that Vega is comparatively "next door" to us, the Andromeda galaxy (our nearest galaxy) is 3000 light years away!

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing the first detection of a magnetic field on the star Vega, one of the brightest stars in the sky. Using the high-sensitivity NARVAL spectropolarimeter installed at the Bernard-Lyot telescope (Pic du Midi Observatory, France), a team of astronomers [1] detected the effect of a magnetic field (known as the Zeeman effect) in the light emitted by Vega. Vega is a famous star among amateur and professional astronomers. Located at only 25 light years from Earth in the Lyra constellation, it is the fifth brightest star in the sky. It has been used as a reference star for brightness comparisons. Vega is twice as massive as the Sun and has only one tenth its age. Because it is both bright and nearby, Vega has been often studied but it is still revealing new aspects when it is observed with more powerful instruments. Vega rotates in less than a day, while the Sun's rotation period is 27 days. The intense centrifugal force induced by this rapid rotation flattens its poles and generates temperature variations of more than 1000 degrees Celsius between the polar (warmer) and the equatorial regions of its surface. Vega is also surrounded by a disk of dust, in which the inhomogeneities suggest the presence of planets.

This time, astronomers analyzed the polarization of light emitted by Vega [2] and detected a weak magnetic field at its surface. This is really not a big surprise because one knows that the charged particle motions inside stars can generate magnetic fields, and this is how solar and terrestrial magnetic fields are produced. However, for more massive stars than the Sun, such as Vega, theoretical models cannot predict the intensity and the structure of the magnetic field, so that astronomers had no clue to the strength of the signal they were looking for. After many unsuccessful attempts in past decades, both the high sensitivity of NARVAL and the full dedication of an observing campaign to Vega have made this first detection possible.

The strength of Vega magnetic field is about 50 micro-tesla, which is close to that of the mean field on Earth and on the Sun. This first observational constraint opens the way to in-depth theoretical studies about the origin of magnetic fields in massive stars. This detection also suggests that magnetic fields exist but have not been detected yet on many stars like Vega, but farther and more difficult to observe. Astronomers believe that this discovery will be a key step in understanding stellar magnetic fields and their influence on stellar evolution. As for Vega, it is now the prototype of a new class of magnetic stars and will definitely continue fascinating astronomers for years.

Source: Astronomy & Astrophysics

Mars Mission Could Ease Earth’s Energy Supply Crisis

ScienceDaily (June 22, 2009) — Techniques and instrumentation initially developed for ExoMars -- Europe’s next robotic mission to Mars in 2016, but now due to fly on a NASA mission in 2018 -- could also provide the answers to the globally pressing issue of energy supply.

A major study by the Imperial College London, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), aims to use this new technology as an inexpensive and efficient way to help process unconventional energy resources, potentially having an enormous impact on the UK and global economy.

Professor Mark Sephton from Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: “The research involves using extraction-helping materials, called surfactants, to liberate organic matter from rock in space to gain a deeper understanding into the biological environment on Mars. We aim to show that the same technique could also be used to recycle the prodigious amounts of water necessary to process tar sand deposits and turn them into conventional petroleum.”

Usable energy resources are essential to the global economy. Conventional crude oil is a staple energy resource and accounts for over 35% of the world’s energy consumption. As the demand for oil exceeds supply, focus has now turned to trying to tap unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands. However, these unconventional fossil fuels must be extracted and upgraded to match the characteristics of more conventional oil deposits and make them commercially viable. The extraction process requires substantial amounts of water which is then left contaminated for extended periods of time. In just hours, the new technology can strip this water of its oily contaminants, removing a bottleneck in the refining process.

“Our new technology is an inexpensive approach that can be used to reduce the water demand during treatment of this type of unconventional hydrocarbon deposit,” said Professor Sephton. “Moreover, these extraction helping materials are environmentally harmless to the extent that they are edible. Our research at Imperial College combines first rate scientific investigation with practical engineering design.”

Dr Liz Towns-Andrews, Director of Knowledge Exchange at STFC, which is funding the study through its Knowledge Exchange Follow on Fund award scheme, added, “This is a truly valuable study which will not only reveal more about our neighbour Mars, but could also deliver enormous benefits here on Earth. The new research is a direct solution to our worsening energy supply crisis and is a great example of the seamless interaction of pure and applied science with engineering to solve real world environmental and commercial issues. Professor Sephton’s work is well aligned with the current needs of industry and we believe that this ambitious project could be of great benefit to the UK economy.”

Source:- ScienceDaily

Carbon couldn't light universe

The oldest carbon isn't in large enough
amounts to have been able to light up the
Universe, according to the researchers.

An international team of astronomers has discovered the oldest and most distant carbon in the Universe, but there's not enough of it to support standard theories of how the Universe lit up, a member from Swinburne University of Technology has calculated.

In the early Universe a dark pervasive fog of neutral hydrogen gas lurked everywhere. Astronomers think that this fog cleared when the first stars formed and emitted light.

There is a close connection between the amount of light and carbon produced in stars. But adding up all the 13-billion-year-old carbon detected, Dr Emma Ryan-Weber and her collaborators came to the conclusion the amount of carbon, and therefore the number of massive stars, was insufficient to lift the fog.

"So light must come from somewhere else, perhaps an unknown population of quasars, or stars that lock-up more of their carbon, or carbon hidden in unobserved states."

When the Universe began with the Big Bang only hydrogen and helium existed. After the first massive stars exploded as supernovae they sprinkled their products of carbon and other elements-of which you, I, and the Earth are comprised-all over the cosmos.

The researchers know the carbon they have discovered is old because it was detected in the infra-red wavelength rather than in the ultra-violet as on Earth. The Universe has expanded so much since the Big Bang, that the wavelength of the light from carbon atoms has stretched from 155 to 1085 nanometres by the time it reaches the Earth.

Even though astronomers have been observing intergalactic carbon for many years, no-one had tried to detect it in the early Universe, because this involved looking in the near-infra-red. Observations in the near-infra-red are challenging because of the interference of intense 'airglow' lines in the night sky.

The details surrounding the end of the dark Universe, a process know as 're-ionisation', are among the last mysteries of modern cosmology. Astronomers have yet to discover when the starlight from the first galaxies lit up the Universe, ionising the surrounding neutral hydrogen gas. And they don't know how massive these galaxies were, or whether they contained the same types of stars as we see today.

Even measurements suggesting the greatest number of galaxies in the early Universe could only lead to just enough light to lift the fog if the conditions are tweaked in the right way. Emma's survey of intergalactic carbon in the early Universe provides a completely independent measure of the amount of starlight.

"A lot more starlight is needed to lift the fog. It's like going from a visibility of a metre to being able to see a kilometre down the road."

Emma and her collaborators are planning further observations to search for carbon in a different state to see if it can make up the shortfall of starlight.

The observations of early carbon took place in collaboration with Prof. Piero Madau from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Prof. Max Pettini and PhD student Berkeley Zych at Cambridge University in the UK. They used the European Southern Observatory's eight-metre Very Large Telescope in Chile as well as the 10-metre W.M. Keck Telescope in Hawaii. The results have recently been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

IBEX Detects Fast Neutral Hydrogen from the Moon

June 18, 2009 - San Antonio - NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of very fast hydrogen atoms coming from the moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence.

During spacecraft commissioning, the IBEX team turned on the IBEX-Hi instrument, built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which measures atoms with speeds from about half a million to 2.5 million miles per hour. Its companion sensor, IBEX-Lo, built by Lockheed Martin, the University of New Hampshire, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the University of Bern in Switzerland, measures atoms with speeds from about one hundred thousand to 1.5 million mph.

"Just after we got IBEX-Hi turned on, the moon happened to pass right through its field of view, and there they were," says Dr. David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division. "The instrument lit up with a clear signal of the neutral atoms being detected as they backscattered from the moon."

The solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles that flows out from the sun, moves out into space in every direction at speeds of about a million mph. The Earth's strong magnetic field shields our planet from the solar wind. The moon, with its relatively weak magnetic field, has no such protection, causing the solar wind to slam onto the moon's sunward side.

From its vantage point in space, IBEX sees about half of the moon - one quarter of it is dark and faces the nightside (away from the sun), while the other quarter faces the dayside (toward the sun). Solar wind particles impact only the dayside, where most of them are embedded in the lunar surface, while some scatter off in different directions. The scattered ones mostly become neutral atoms in this reflection process by picking up electrons from the lunar surface.

The IBEX team estimates that only about 10 percent of the solar wind ions reflect off the sunward side of the moon as neutral atoms, while the remaining 90 percent are embedded in the lunar surface. Characteristics of the lunar surface, such as dust, craters and rocks, play a role in determining the percentage of particles that become embedded and the percentage of neutral particles, as well as their direction of travel, that scatter.

McComas says the results also shed light on the "recycling" process undertaken by particles throughout the solar system and beyond. The solar wind and other charged particles impact dust and larger objects as they travel through space, where they backscatter and are reprocessed as neutral atoms. These atoms can travel long distances before they are stripped of their electrons and become ions and the complicated process begins again.

The combined scattering and neutralization processes now observed at the moon have implications for interactions with objects across the solar system, such as asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects and other moons. The plasma-surface interactions occurring within protostellar nebula, the region of space that forms around planets and stars - as well as exoplanets, planets around other stars - also can be inferred.

IBEX's primary mission is to observe and map the complex interactions occurring at the edge of the solar system, where the million miles per hour solar wind runs into the interstellar material from the rest of the galaxy. The spacecraft carries the most sensitive neutral atom detectors ever flown in space, enabling researchers to not only measure particle energy, but also to make precise images of where they are coming from.

Around the end of the summer, the team will release the spacecraft's first all-sky map showing the energetic processes occurring at the edge of the solar system. The team will not comment until the image is complete, but McComas hints, "It doesn't look like any of the models."

IBEX is the latest in NASA's series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers spacecraft. The IBEX mission was developed by SwRI with a national and international team of partners. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the Explorers Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

"Lunar Backscatter and Neutralization of the Solar Wind: First Observations of Neutral Atoms from the Moon," by McComas, F. Allegrini, P. Bochsler, P. Frisch, H.O. Funsten, M. Gruntman, P.H. Janzen, H. Kucharek, E. Moebius, D.B. Reisenfeld, and N.A. Schwadron, was just published by Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2009GL038794.

Source: Southwest Research Institute

Physicists create 'black hole for sound'

By accelerating atoms across the dark gap at the centre of this image, researchers think they might be able to create an acoustic black hole capable of producing the first detectable Hawking radiation (Image: O. Lahav et al.)

An artificial black hole that traps sound instead of light has been created in an attempt to detect theoretical Hawking radiation. The radiation, proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking more than 30 years ago, causes black holes to evaporate over time.

Astrophysical black holes are created when matter becomes so dense that it collapses to a point called a singularity. The black hole's gravity is so great that nothing – not even light – can escape from a boundary around it called an event horizon.

But physicists have also been developing 'black holes' for sound. They do this by coaxing a material to move faster than the speed of sound in that medium, so that sound waves travelling within it cannot keep up, like fish swimming in a fast-moving stream. The sound is effectively trapped in the stream-like event horizon.

Quantum state

The materials physicists are focusing on are called Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), a quantum state of matter where a clump of atoms behaves like a single atom.

Condensates have been made that move supersonically before, so physicists have likely created acoustic black holes in the process of working with BECs, says Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who shared a 2001 Nobel Prize for the development of Bose-Einstein condensates.

But he says a new study by Jeff Steinhauer of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and colleagues is the first documented experiment directly aimed at producing Hawking radiation in a BEC.

Supersonic flow

The team cooled 100,000 or so charged rubidium atoms to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero and trapped them with a magnetic field. Using a laser, the researchers then created a well of electric potential that attracted the atoms and caused them to zip across the well faster than the speed of sound in the material.

This setup created a supersonic flow that lasted for some 8 milliseconds, fleetingly forming an acoustic black hole capable of trapping sound.

The implications of such work could be profound, as it could lead to the first detection of Hawking radiation.

Quantum mechanics says that pairs of particles can spontaneously appear out of empty space. These pairs, which consist of a particle and its antiparticle, should exist for a fleeting moment before they annihilate each other and disappear.

But in the 1970s, Hawking proposed that if the pair was created near the edge of a black hole, one particle might fall in before it is destroyed, leaving its partner stranded outside the event horizon. To observers, this particle would appear as radiation. In acoustic black holes, Hawking radiation would take the form of particle-like packets of vibrational energy called phonons.

Big boon

Finding Hawking radiation would be a big boon for physics, says cosmologist Sean Carroll of Caltech. "For one thing, Stephen Hawking would win the Nobel Prize," Carroll told New Scientist. "But it would more just show us that we're on the right track."

That's because Hawking's theory makes some fundamental propositions about how quantum mechanics works in space that is curved by gravity. The underlying math is used to calculate how the universe behaved during a period called inflation, when space rapidly expanded soon after the big bang.

Detecting Hawking radiation through astronomical observations, however, is difficult, because the evaporation of typical black holes is obscured by higher-energy sources of radiation, including the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang.

'First step'

And researchers still have a way to go before they can detect Hawking radiation in acoustic black holes. Steinhauer's team, for example, estimates that the boost in velocity that atoms get in their setup must be about 10 times bigger in order to create detectable Hawking radiation in the form of phonons.

"Actually detecting the sound waves produced by the hole is really tough. But this is an exciting first step," says Bill Unruh of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who first proposed the idea of using quantum fluids to create artificial event horizons.

Cornell agrees, adding that the team needs to make the BEC flow much more smoothly in order to measure the subtle sign of Hawking radiation. "What they've done is kind of the easy part," he told New Scientist. "The hard part is to do that in such a quiet way that you can see all the tiny fluctuations on top of all the violent things you've done to the condensate [to make it go supersonic]."

Cornell and his colleagues are building their own experimental setup to produce acoustic event horizons.

Laser pulses

And others hope to produce detectable Hawking radiation in the lab using light. In 2008, a team created an artificial event horizon in an optical fibre, exploiting the fact that different wavelengths of light move at different speeds in the fibre.

They did this by sending a relatively slow-moving pulse down the fibre. This distorted the fibre's optical properties, so that when a second, faster pulse caught up with the first one, it was slowed down and effectively became trapped behind the event-horizon-like leading edge of the first pulse.

An astrophysical detection of Hawking radiation may still be possible. The smaller a black hole is, the higher the energy its Hawking radiation is. So the evaporation of microscopic black holes that some researchers suspect were created almost immediately after the big bang might be detectable using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which launched in 2008.

Source:- NewScientist

Meteorite Grains Divulge Earth's Cosmic Roots

This is University of Chicago postdoctoral scientist Philipp Heck with a sample of the Allende meteorite. The dark portions of the meteorite contain dust grains that formed before the birth of the solar system. The Allenda meteorite is of the same type as the Murchison meteorite, the subject of Heck’s Astrophysical Journal study. (Credit: Dan Dry)

ScienceDaily (June 15, 2009) — The interstellar stuff that became incorporated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict, according to the University of Chicago postdoctoral scholar Philipp Heck and his international team of colleagues.

Heck and his colleagues examined 22 interstellar grains from the Murchison meteorite for their analysis. Dying sun-like stars flung the Murchison grains into space more than 4.5 billion years ago, before the birth of the solar system. Scientists know the grains formed outside the solar system because of their exotic composition.

"The concentration of neon, produced during cosmic-ray irradiation, allows us to determine the time a grain has spent in interstellar space," Heck said. His team determined that 17 of the grains spent somewhere between three million and 200 million years in interstellar space, far less than the theoretical estimates of approximately 500 million years. Only three grains met interstellar duration expectations (two grains yielded no reliable age).

"The knowledge of this lifetime is essential for an improved understanding of interstellar processes, and to better contain the timing of formation processes of the solar system," Heck said. A period of intense star formation that preceded the sun's birth may have produced large quantities of dust, thus accounting for the timing discrepancy, according to the research team.

Funding sources for the research include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Swiss National Science Foundation, the Australian National University, and the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development.

Source: ScienceDaily

NASA Hosts Media Briefings About Earth System Science Advances

WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold two media briefings to present new developments in research and benefits to society made possible by the Earth system science approach pioneered by the agency during the last 20 years. The briefings will be held on June 23 and 24 at 12:30 p.m. EDT at the National Academy of Sciences, 2100 C St., NW, Washington.

The briefings are part of the "NASA Earth System Science at 20: Accomplishments, Plans and Challenges" symposium sponsored by NASA's Earth Science Division. NASA embarked on a revolutionary mission for its Earth science program 20 years ago: to study our planet from space as an inter-related whole. The June 22-24 symposium features more than 20 invited talks, including a presentation on June 22 at 11 a.m. by NASA Acting Administrator Christopher Scolese about the evolution of NASA's Earth-observing capability.

The media briefing on Tuesday, June 23, will focus on current Earth system science projects that are providing new benefits to society:

* From Satellites to Whales: Stewardship of Living Marine Resources New capabilities produce forecasts of marine habitats that support management of sustainable fisheries and mitigate adverse human interactions with protected species. Presented by Dave Foley of the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Pacific Grove, Calif.

* Forecasting California Agricultural Water Needs Developing targeted forecasts of crops' water needs to reduce water use and boost crop yields. Presented by Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffet Field, Calif.

* From Space to Village: The Growing SERVIR Program The Web-based network that brings critical Earth information to decision-makers in developing countries. Presented by Dan Irwin of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The media briefing on Wednesday, June 24, highlights new research frontiers made possible by the Earth system science perspective:

* Where Deserts and Mountains Collide: Snowmelt and Disturbed Desert Dust Probing the link between dust storms, mountain snowpack, ecosystems and the impact on water resources in arid regions of the world. Presented by Tom Painter, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

* A New View of Arctic Haze Early results from a NASA mission investigating the complexities of the "Arctic haze" phenomenon, its causes, and its climate impacts. Presented by Jim Crawford of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

* Rethinking What Causes Spring Phytoplankton Blooms A new analysis of satellite data is challenging assumptions about the cause of the North Atlantic spring bloom. Presented by Michael Behrenfeld, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Ore.

* New Tools for Carbon Detectives: Tracking Carbon Emissions and Sequestration A breakthrough in producing high-resolution maps of carbon release and uptake by people, plants, and soils over North America using satellite and atmospheric data. Presented by Anna Michalak, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

A press room will be available throughout the symposium for registered journalists. Reporters are required to pre-register for the symposium at:

http://dels.nas.edu/osb/nasa.shtml

Background material and visuals supporting the presentations will be available online one hour before the start of each briefing at:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earthsystem_science.html

Reporters who cannot attend the briefings may participate via teleconference. For dial-in instructions, contact Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov. Audio of the media briefings will be streamed live on NASA's Web site at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

The symposium also features a free public event on June 23 from 5:15 to 6:30 p.m. in the National Academy auditorium. "Observations of Our Changing Earth from Space" will feature a panel discussion with several Earth scientists and a performance from violinist Kenji Williams.

For more information about NASA programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

Strategic Science Initiatives in the Origins of Life Report from the NAI meeting

By Michael Wilson

The NAI held a strategic science initiative workshop in Tempe, AZ on May 13-15, to identify areas where increased collaboration between the funded NAI teams could lead to greater scientific insights and productivity. One of the initiative areas focused on origins of life research; the origins initiative was chaired by George Cody (Carnegie team) and John Peters (Montana State team) and Stephen Freeland (University of Hawaii team).

Initial roundtable discussion lead to identification of three (later expanded to four) areas that people wanted to develop into more focused initiatives: a collaboration between the MSU, PSU and JPL Icy Worlds teams on iron-sulfur complexes, a collaboration between the GIT and MSU teams to investigate substitution of Mg2+ with Fe2+ in ribosomal RNA; a collaboration between the Hawaii and MSU teams to develop an information infrastructure for conditions and processes that are relevant to astrobiological research; and a collaboration between the Carnegie, Goddard and Wisconsin teams (with contributions from PSU, GIT and Ames) to investigate the effects of minerals surfaces on small organic molecules in the context of the origins of life.

The teams in the Fe-S initiative plan "to probe the links between iron-sulfur based reversible CO oxidation and C-C bond formation in the context of prebiotic chemistry and the origin of life." If successful, they would demonstrate for the first time the recruitment of mineral components into a proto-enzyme, and would transform our thinking about possible connections between abiotic catalysis and biocatalysis.

In the RNA initiative, investigating the possibility of substituting Fe2+ for Mg2+ in RNA assemblies will allow the teams to: 'Explore the robustness of RNA folding and catalysis under conditions that may be similar to early biotic earth, explore the chemistry and reactivity of iron and other metals in prebiotic and early biotic environments, and determine the possible role of nucleic acids in this chemistry, and explore the possible role of iron in early RNA biochemistry.'

The teams in the information infrastructure initiative hope to develop a "one-stop" information database that would "avoid duplication of effort, identify outlier projects, and communicate findings across teams and research areas" by collating and contrasting "the conditions under which astrobiologically relevant processes occur."

The small molecules initiative hopes to "Establish the potential role of minerals as sources and sinks in the preservation, catalysis of formation, degradation, and self-assembly of prebiotic and bioorganic small molecules (monomers to oligomers) in the origin and early evolution of life" using high-throughput analytical methods. This would allow them to "rapidly establish interfacial organic molecule affinity -structure-activity" and has "mplications for establishing potential role of mineral-organic interfaces in formation, degradation and preservation of small molecules and in preservation of biosignatures in minerals."

Ultimately, the workshop served to foster potential collaborations between research groups in existing NAI teams. One observation is that face-to-face meetings have a directness that virtual meetings currently lack, and I don't think as much would have been accomplished in a virtual setting. The question is what can we do to achieve this level of interaction in a virtual meeting?

New study closes in on geologic history of Earth's deep interior

By using a super-computer to virtually squeeze and heat iron-bearing minerals under conditions that would have existed when the Earth crystallized from an ocean of magma to its solid form 4.5 billion years ago, two UC Davis geochemists have produced the first picture of how different isotopes of iron were initially distributed in the solid Earth.

The discovery could usher in a wave of investigations into the evolution of Earth's mantle, a layer of material about 1,800 miles deep that extends from just beneath the planet's thin crust to its metallic core.

"Now that we have some idea of how these isotopes of iron were originally distributed on Earth," said study senior author James Rustad, a Chancellor's fellow and professor of geology, "we should be able to use the isotopes to trace the inner workings of Earth's engine."

A paper describing the study by Rustad and co-author Qing-zhu Yin, an associate professor of geology, was posted online by the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday, June 14, in advance of print publication in July.

Sandwiched between Earth's crust and core, the vast mantle accounts for about 85 percent of the planet's volume. On a human time scale, this immense portion of our orb appears to be solid. But over millions of years, heat from the molten core and the mantle's own radioactive decay cause it to slowly churn, like thick soup over a low flame. This circulation is the driving force behind the surface motion of tectonic plates, which builds mountains and causes earthquakes.

One source of information providing insight into the physics of this viscous mass are the four stable forms, or isotopes, of iron that can be found in rocks that have risen to Earth's surface at mid-ocean ridges where seafloor spreading is occurring, and at hotspots like Hawaii's volcanoes that poke up through the Earth's crust. Geologists suspect that some of this material originates at the boundary between the mantle and the core some 1,800 miles beneath the surface.

"Geologists use isotopes to track physico-chemical processes in nature the way biologists use DNA to track the evolution of life," Yin said.

Because the composition of iron isotopes in rocks will vary depending on the pressure and temperature conditions under which a rock was created, Yin said, in principle, geologists could use iron isotopes in rocks collected at hot spots around the world to track the mantle's geologic history. But in order to do so, they would first need to know how the isotopes were originally distributed in Earth's primordial magma ocean when it cooled down and hardened.

As a team, Yin and Rustad were the ideal partners to solve this riddle. Yin and his laboratory are leaders in the field of using advanced mass spectrometric analytical techniques to produce accurate measurements of the subtle variations in isotopic composition of minerals. Rustad is renowned for his expertise in using large computer clusters to run high-level quantum mechanical calculations to determine the properties of minerals.

The challenge the pair faced was to determine how the competing effects of extreme pressure and temperature deep in Earth's interior would have affected the minerals in the lower mantle, the zone that stretches from about 400 miles beneath the planet's crust to the core-mantle boundary. Temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Kelvin in the region reduce the isotopic differences between minerals to a miniscule level, while crushing pressures tend to alter the basic form of the iron atom itself, a phenomenon known as electronic spin transition.

Using Rustad's powerful 144-processor computer, the two calculated the iron isotope composition of two minerals under a range of temperatures, pressures and different electronic spin states that are now known to occur in the lower mantle. The two minerals, ferroperovskite and ferropericlase, contain virtually all of the iron that occurs in this deep portion of the Earth.

These calculations were so complex that each series Rustad and Yin ran through the computer required a month to complete.

In the end, the calculations showed that extreme pressures would have concentrated iron's heavier isotopes near the bottom of the crystallizing mantle.

It will be a eureka moment when these theoretical predictions are verified one day in geological samples that have been generated from the lower mantle, Yin said. But the logical next step for him and Rustad to take, he said, is to document the variation of iron isotopes in pure chemicals subjected to temperatures and pressures in the laboratory that are equivalent to those found at the core-mantle boundary. This can be achieved using lasers and a tool called a diamond anvil.

"Much more fun work lies ahead," he said. "And that's exciting."

###

The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences, and by a NASA Cosmochemistry grant and a NASA Origins of Solar Systems grant.

An abstract of the paper "Iron isotope fractionation in the Earth's lower mantle" can be found at http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo546.html.

Space Geology: From the Moon to Mars

Using a specially designed metal scoop, the author took soil samples from the floor of Camelot Crater on December 12, 1972. Human geologists may one day do the same on Mars; in the meantime, they rely on robot proxies such as Mars Pathfinder, which explored Ares Vallis in 1997.
Photoillustration by Scientific American; Courtesy of NASA (moon and Mars)

The Apollo lunar exploration that began 40 years ago was not done primarily for science, but science nonetheless benefited hugely. The astronauts collected samples and took measurements that narrowed hypotheses of the moon’s origin and provided a point of comparison for observations of other planets.
On the final moon shot, Apollo 17 in December 1972, the author became the only scientist ever to visit the moon. As he describes here, lunar exploration proved to be similar to geologic field­work on Earth. He learned to mentally disentangle the effects of meteor impacts to see the underlying rock types. But it was tricky to judge distance in the alien landscape, and stiff spacesuit gloves limited how fast he could work.
Similar issues will arise on Mars missions.

Read Whole Article Here at Scientific American

Tiny Frozen Microbe May Hold Clues To Extraterrestrial Life

Trapped more than three kilometers under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120,000 years, a dormant bacterium has been coaxed back to life by researchers. (Credit: iStockphoto/Frank Van Den Bergh)

ScienceDaily (June 15, 2009) — A novel bacterium -- trapped more than three kilometres under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120,000 years -- may hold clues as to what life forms might exist on other planets.

Dr Jennifer Loveland-Curtze and a team of scientists from Pennsylvania State University report finding the novel microbe, which they have called Herminiimonas glaciei, in the current issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. The team showed great patience in coaxing the dormant microbe back to life; first incubating their samples at 2˚C for seven months and then at 5˚C for a further four and a half months, after which colonies of very small purple-brown bacteria were seen.

H. glaciei is small even by bacterial standards – it is 10 to 50 times smaller than E. coli. Its small size probably helped it to survive in the liquid veins among ice crystals and the thin liquid film on their surfaces. Small cell size is considered to be advantageous for more efficient nutrient uptake, protection against predators and occupation of micro-niches and it has been shown that ultramicrobacteria are dominant in many soil and marine environments.

Most life on our planet has always consisted of microorganisms, so it is reasonable to consider that this might be true on other planets as well. Studying microorganisms living under extreme conditions on Earth may provide insight into what sorts of life forms could survive elsewhere in the solar system.

"These extremely cold environments are the best analogues of possible extraterrestrial habitats", said Dr Loveland-Curtze, "The exceptionally low temperatures can preserve cells and nucleic acids for even millions of years. H. glaciei is one of just a handful of officially described ultra-small species and the only one so far from the Greenland ice sheet; studying these bacteria can provide insights into how cells can survive and even grow under extremely harsh conditions, such as temperatures down to -56˚C, little oxygen, low nutrients, high pressure and limited space."

"H. glaciei isn't a pathogen and is not harmful to humans", Dr Loveland-Curtze added, "but it can pass through a 0.2 micron filter, which is the filter pore size commonly used in sterilization of fluids in laboratories and hospitals. If there are other ultra-small bacteria that are pathogens, then they could be present in solutions presumed to be sterile. In a clear solution very tiny cells might grow but not create the density sufficient to make the solution cloudy."

Source:- http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090614201734.htm

Magnetic Tremors Pinpoint the Impact Epicenter of Earthbound Space Storms

(NASA) - Using data from NASA’s THEMIS mission, a team of University of Alberta researchers has pinpointed the impact epicenter of an earthbound space storm as it crashes into the atmosphere, and given an advance warning of its arrival.

The team’s study reveals that magnetic blast waves can be used to pinpoint and predict the location where space storms dissipate their massive amounts of energy. These storms can dump the equivalent of 50 gigawatts of power, or the output of 10 of the world’s largest power stations, into Earth’s atmosphere.

Artist’s concept of a solar storm breaking through the earth’s magnetic field. Credit: NASA

The energy that drives space storms originates on the sun. The stream of electrically charged particles in the solar wind carries this energy toward Earth. The solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field. Scientists call the process that begins with Earth’s magnetic field capturing energy and ends with its release into the atmosphere a geomagnetic substorm.

“Substorm onset occurs when Earth’s magnetic field suddenly and dramatically releases energy previously captured by the solar wind,” said David Sibeck, project scientist for the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms (THEMIS) mission at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Physicists Jonathan Rae and Ian Mann lead the University of Alberta research team that recently located a substorm’s epicenter of the impact. The team uses ground-based observatories spread across northern Canada and the five satellites of the THEMIS mission to detect magnetic disturbances as storms crash into the atmosphere. Using a technique the researchers call “space seismology,” they look for the eye of the storm hundreds of thousands of miles above Earth.

“We see the benevolent side of space storms in the form of the Northern Lights,” said Mann. “When electrically charged particles speed toward Earth and buffet the atmosphere, the result is often a dancing, shimmering light over the polar region.” But there is also a hazardous side. Earth’s atmosphere protects us from the damaging direct effects of the radiation from space storms, but in space there is nowhere to hide. High-energy, electrically charged particles released by space storms can damage spacecraft. On Earth, disturbances caused by the particles and the electrical currents they carry can interrupt radio communications and global positioning system (GPS) navigation, and damage electric power grids.

Rae and Mann’s team has also determined that the magnetic tremors show that the space storm impact into the atmosphere has a unique epicenter, with the eye of the storm located in space beyond the low-Earth orbits of most communication satellites.

Guided by Earth’s magnetic field, the magnetic tremors rocket through space toward Earth. These geomagnetic substorms trigger magnetic sensors on the ground as they impact the atmosphere. The effects of these storms, and the most spectacular displays of the Northern Lights, follow a few minutes later.

The objective of NASA’s pioneering multi-spacecraft THEMIS mission is to determine what causes geomagnetic substorms. In addition to a well-instrumented fleet of five spacecraft, THEMIS operates a network of ground observatories stretching across Canada and the United States to place the spacecraft observations in their global context. All night long, every night, the observatories take 3-second time resolution snapshots of the aurora and measure corresponding variations in Earth’s magnetic field strength and direction every half second.

An analysis of the auroral movies and magnetic variations by Dr. Jonathan Rae from the University of Alberta pinpointed just when and where one substorm explosively released its magnetic energy. “Undulating auroral features and ripples in Earth’s magnetic field began at the same time and propagated away from Sanikulaq, Nunavut, Canada at speeds on the order of 60,000 miles per hour, much like the blast wave from a gigantic explosion,” said Sibeck. Dr. Rae and his team presented the results on May 25 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Toronto.

Probing the eye of a space storm and recognizing the advance warning signs are crucial for researchers trying to understand and predict space weather. Key questions about when and how space storms start are still challenging researchers on the THEMIS team. Like forecasters on Earth who predict severe weather, the University of Alberta researchers are using their “space seismology” technique to investigate methods to forecast space storms.

THEMIS is a NASA-funded mission and involves scientists from Canada, the United States, and Europe. Current Canadian activity is funded by the Canadian Space Agency.