Stellary Starry Universe

 

NASA is planning a mission to study the Moon’s fragile atmosphere–before it’s too late.

Oct. 23, 2009: Right now, the Moon is a ghost town. Nothing stirs. Here and there, an abandoned Apollo rover — or the dusty base of a lunar lander — linger as silent testimony to past human activity. But these days, only occasional asteroid impacts disrupt the decades-long spell of profound stillness.

Currently, the Moon’s tenuous atmosphere is relatively undisturbed. But that won’t be true for long. NASA is planning to return people to the Moon, and human activity will kick up dust, expel rocket exhaust, and release other gaseous emissions into the lunar atmosphere. Because the atmosphere is so thin, these disturbances could quickly swamp its natural composition. [...]

 

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

 

 

Caused by debris from Halley’s Comet, the 2009 Orionid meteor shower peaks on Wednesday, Oct. 21st, and forecasters say it could be an unusually good show.

 

October 19, 2009: The Orionid meteor shower peaks this week and it could be a very good show.

“Earth is passing through a stream of debris from Halley’s Comet, the source of the Orionids,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour.”

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

 

 

NASA’s IBEX spacecraft has discovered a vast, glowing ribbon at the edge of the solar system. One mission scientist calls the discovery "shocking" and says theorists are "working like crazy" to explain the finding.

October 15, 2009: For years, researchers have known that the solar system is surrounded by a vast bubble of magnetism. Called the “heliosphere,” it springs from the sun and extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto, providing a first line of defense against cosmic rays and interstellar clouds that try to enter our local space. Although the heliosphere is huge and literally fills the sky, it emits no light and no one has actually seen it.

Until now.

NASA’s IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere and the results have taken researchers by surprise. [...]

 

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

 

 

How do you fly on a world with no atmosphere? Wings won’t work and neither do propellers. The space agency is perfecting the art of "airless flying" using a prototype lunar lander at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

 

 

 

Electric-blue jets emerging from the lander look like some kind of futuristic high-tech gas, but in fact they are just ordinary compressed air. [...]

 

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

 

 

Archeologists are using NASA satellites and supercomputers to crack the mystery of the ancient Maya. New findings suggest the Maya may have played a key role in their own downfall.

 

October 6, 2009: For 1200 years, the Maya dominated Central America. At their peak around 900 A.D., Maya cities teemed with more than 2,000 people per square mile — comparable to modern Los Angeles County. Even in rural areas the Maya numbered 200 to 400 people per square mile. But suddenly, all was quiet. And the profound silence testified to one of the greatest demographic disasters in human prehistory — the demise of the once vibrant Maya society.

“They did it to themselves,” says veteran archeologist Tom Sever.

“The Maya are often depicted as people who lived in complete harmony with their environment,’ says PhD student Robert Griffin. “But like many other cultures before and after them, they ended up deforesting and destroying their landscape in efforts to eke out a living in hard times.” [...]

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article