earth •

NASA Shares Spectacular Pic of Earthrise over Moon

A revisited version of the first color image of an Earthrise over moon, which was taken in 1968.

As of recently, NASA shared spectacular Earthrise over Moon after researchers had compiled several high-resolution images taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) a couple of months ago.

In the recently released photo, we can see a sunlit side of our planet in the background and a desolated moonscape in the foreground, and the contrast is simply breathtaking. Noah Petro, a researcher involved in the LRO mission, recently noted that the composite image is ‘simply stunning.’

Petro added that the image brings back old memories of the spectacular ‘Blue Marble’ photo snapped by Apollo 17 astronauts more than four decades ago. Both pictures show the African continent prominently in the image.

But the photo also resembles the ‘Earthrise’ pic taken by crew members during the Apollo 8 mission when they entered the lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, 1968. Apollo 8 was the first human mission that managed to go beyond Earth’s orbit.

Former Vice President Al Gore said about about the 1968 picture that it inspired the modern-day conservationist movement worldwide. Gore explained that, after 18 months from the official release of the photograph, world celebrated the first Earth Day.

Additionally, the environmental awareness triggered by the breath-taking photo led to several pieces of legislation in the U.S. including the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

But that picture was not the first of its kind. Lunar Orbiter 1 had snapped the first ‘Earthrise’ a in 1966. Yet, that photo didn’t have a major impact since it was rendered in black and white.

NASA explained that the latest Earthrise photograph is the work of a team that managed to gather pictures from two of LRO’s optical instruments during its voyage around the moon. The photos were snapped over the course of a single day, on Oct. 12, from an 83-mile distance above the lunar soil. The orbiter was able to capture the Compton crater which is located on the natural satellite’s dark side which is never visible from Earth.

NASA researchers explained that we can never see the moon’s far side from ground because our planet and its moon are tidally locked. For the same reason, an astronaut that stands on the lunar surface could never experience and ‘Earthrise’ or an ‘Earthset.’ Astronauts that walked on the moon said that they could see the Earth, and continents moving on its surface, but it never changed its position on the sky.

The recent picture was posted on NASA’s official website on Dec. 18.
Image Source: Wikimedia

Study Claims Universe Might Be A Hologram

By Leave a Comment

Scientists have announced that hologram theory could be true in some “realistic models” of the universe.

The “holographic principle” suggests that a mathematical definition of the universe actually needs one fewer dimension than it appears. What has been believed as three dimensional could just be the image of only two dimensional processes on an immense cosmic horizon.

Results attained by scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) now revealed that the holographic principle is valid even in a flat space-time.

Most people know about holograms from credit cards or cash banknotes. Holograms are two dimensional, but to the human eye they seem to be three dimensional. The universe could be very similar to this example.

Daniel Grumiller (TU Wien) mentioned that back in 1997, the physicist Juan Maldacena advanced the idea that there was a link between gravitational theories in curved spaces and quantum field theories in spaces with one fewer dimension.

Gravitational phenomena are defined in a theory with three spatial dimensions, while the behavior of quantum particles is calculated in a theory with only two spatial dimensions, while the results of both calculations can be related to each other.

The discovery meant that, for example, equations which are valid in astronomy could also be used to repair a CD-player. This method has been proven to be successful. Over ten thousand scientific studies about Maldacena’s “AdS-CFT-correspondence” have been published until today.

Grumiller has thought that a correspondence principle could also be true for our real universe. To test this belief, gravitational theories have to be built, a hypothesis which does not require extravagant anti-de-sitter spaces, but only a flat space. For three years, Grumiller and his colleagues at TU Wien (Vienna) have been developing this, along with the MIT, the University of Edinburgh, IISER Pune, Harvard and the University of Kyoto.

When quantum particles are mixed up, they cannot be explained individually. They are forming a single quantum object, even if they are far apart from one another.

Together with Rudranil Basu, Arjun Bagchi and Max Riegler, Grumiller succeeded to reveal that the entropy of entanglement will take the same value in a low dimension quantum field theory and in flat quantum gravity.

This finding however, does not prove yet that the universe is a hologram, but is a move towards the validity of the correspondence principle in the universe.

The research is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Image Source: Pop Chassid

Scientists Want To Blast Space Debris With Lasers

By Leave a Comment

The debris from space is an important problem for the scientists responsible with the protection of Earth from extraterrestrial hazards.

Being a subject whose importance is of international level, eliminating the space debris has been considered recently by a global team of scientists, with the Japanese Riken research institute being one of the main leaders of the study. The researchers who take part in this study have announced to have discovered a way to remove the space debris,

The ambitious plan of an international group of scientists is based on developing a system that can shoot the space debris with lasers.

The innovative system is made by two main components: a super efficient fiber optic based laser and a wide field of view telescope built by EUSO team from the Japan’s Riken research institute.

The telescope was originally designed to detect ultraviolet light which is coming from the ultra-high-energy cosmic rays which are entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

Toshikazu Ebisuzaki, one of the scientists in charge of the project, believes that it could be utilized to detect high-velocity space debris fragments at twilight.

Once such a debris is observed by the system then it would give orders to the laser to discharge an intense pulse of light onto the object.

The debris is destroyed by the process named plasma ablation. In this process one side of the debris is subjected to intense heats and transform into plasma, While the plasma will harden, the proces would create thrust, bringing the debris down to be destroyed when reentering the atmosphere.

The Riken scientists recently published its intentions in the journal Acta Astronautica.

Now, the team of researchers want to install a small, similar system aboard the International Space Station using a 100 strand laser and a 20 cm telescope.

”If that goes well,“we plan to install a full-scale version on the International Space Station, incorporating a three-meter telescope and a laser with 10,000 fibers, giving it the ability to deorbit debris with a range of approximately 100 kilometers. Looking further to the future, we could create a free-flyer mission and put it into a polar orbit at an altitude near 800 kilometers, where the greatest concentration of debris is found,” Riken team leader Toshikazu Ebisuzaki said in a news release.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Unusual Total Lunar Eclipse At Dawn on April 4th

By 2 Comments

A total lunar eclipse, called the “blood Moon,” will be visible in North America, East Asia, the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand on Saturday, April 4, 2015.

The ”blood Moon” is a rare form of lunar eclipse that happens when the Earth casts its shadow on the moon and also blocks the sunlight. The light emitted by the Sun still light up the surface of the Moon in spite of the blockage, but gives Earth’s natural satellite a strange color, varying from bright red to brown.

The lunar eclipse is expected to last for about three hours and 29 minutes while the total eclipse will be visible for five minutes, according to Time and Date. The Moon is in the middle of a lunar tetrad, which happens when four total lunar eclipses occur in a row. The lunar eclipse that will occur on April 4, 2015 is the third eclipse of this event. The lunar tetrad also had two prior eclipses on April 14-15, 2014 and October 7-8 2014, while a fourth eclipse is expected to occur on September 8, 2015.

The schedule of this lunar is as follows. Penumbra, which happens when the Moon enters the outer fringe of the Earth’s shadow, is the start of the lunar eclipse. Since the shade is still weak, penumbra cannot be seen with the naked eye. When the Moon advances inwards, the shading becomes much stronger. This marks the beginning of the umbra second stage or the partial eclipse.

The third stage is the total eclipse where the Moon is completely covered by Earth’s shadow. The Moon will then glow in red, orange or brown color. Two factors influence the color of the eclipse. The first is the state of the Earth’s atmosphere. The second is the amount of the surface of the Moon that enters the umbra phase as it passes through. The last two stages, the fourth and fifth, respectively, of the lunar eclipse are next, and refer to the period in which the moon re-emerges into the sunlight, ending the eclipse.

Unlike a total solar eclipse, which can only be observed from a small path across the Earth, the lunar eclipse can be seen by half of the world. Also, compared to the solar eclipse, for the lunar eclipse you don’t need special protection for the eyes to safely observe it.

Image Source: Sky and Telescope

Planet Jupiter Destroyed The First Version Of Our Solar System

By Leave a Comment

According to a new a study of Caltech’s planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin and by Gregory Laughlin, UC Santa Cruz professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Jupiter was a wrecking ball for the ancient Solar System, which was made up by a number of super-Earths.

The new research states that that the system used to contain planets which were bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

“Our work suggests that Jupiter’s inward-outward migration could have destroyed a first generation of planets and set the stage for the formation of the mass-depleted terrestrial planets that our solar system has today,” said Batygin in a statement, adding that the discovery is filling some gaps in the understanding of the evolution of our solar system.

Researchers have been baffled by the low mass of the planets of in the Solar System. Most systems with a star of the dimension of our Sun have super-sized planets. This new theory explains how our planets, which are the remnants of bigger bodies, ended up to be so small.

Most planetary systems, which are different from ours, typically have one or more planets that are larger than Earth orbiting closer to their suns than Mercury does, our closest world.

In the Solar System, there’s nothing closer to the Sun than Mercury except a little debris from near-Earth asteroids and lots

A scenario that explains the formation of Jupiter and Saturn suggests that Jupiter was migrating towards the Sun, but the movement stopped when the formation of Saturn pushed back the plane. The two scientists completed a set of simulations to observe what would have occurred if a set of planets near the Sun had formed before Jupiter got there.

The researches say that some rocky worlds were forming close to the Sun, and their bodies were becoming super-Earths, gathering dense gas and dust, but as Jupiter headed in towards the Sun, gravitational forces from the huge planet would have swept these planets and other asteroids into overlapping orbits, which destroyed them.

The remnants from the collisions headed towards the Sun.and this would have destroyed all newly-formed super-Earths. Some debris would become the source material for a second generation of the current smaller worlds.

The Jupiter crashing effect through the system is how smaller planets, like Earth , Mercury, Venus and Mars, with their more thinner atmospheres were formed.

Image Source: Wallpaper Kid

World’s Largest Meteorite Crash Site Found

By Leave a Comment

A team of Scientists has discovered a 400 km-wide impact zone from a giant meteorite in central Australia – the largest asteroid crater ever found on Earth.

Dr Andrew Glikson from the Australian National University (ANU) and his colleagues found a 400 kilometer-wide impact zone from a huge asteroid that broke in two, just moments before it hit the Earth in central Australia.

The impact happened millions of years ago and it’s crater has long disappeared. Researchers discovered two scars made by the impacts hidden deep in the Earth’s crust.

Glikson said the discovery came by chance. The impact zone was found during drilling as part of geothermal research, in an area near the borders of Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory.

“The two meteorites must each have been over 10 kilometers wide, ending the life of species on the planet at the time,” he explained. “Huge impacts like these may have had a far more significant role in the Earth’s evolution than previously thought,” Glikson added.

The exact time of the huge impacts remains unclear. According to the team of geologists, the surrounding rocks are up to 300 million years old, but evidence of this kind left by other asteroid strikes is lacking.

For example, a large asteroid strike which happened 66 million years ago sent up a veil of ash that is found as a layer of sediment in rocks all around the world. The veil is thought to have led to the extinction of a great proportion of the life species on the planet, including many dinosaurs.

However, a similar layer has not been discovered in sediments around 300 million years old, the scientist said.

“It’s a mystery. We can’t find an event that matches these impacts. I suspect the collision could be older than 300 million years,” he said.

The researchers drilled more than two kilometers into the Earth’s crust, discovering traces of rocks that have been turned to glass by the extreme heat caused by a major impact. Magnetic mapping of the deep crust in the area pointed out out bulges hidden deep in the Earth, which are rich in iron and magnesium, comparable to the composition of the Earth mantle.

“There are two huge deep domes in the crust, formed by the Earth’s crust rebounding after the huge impacts, and bringing up rock from the mantle below,” Glikson added.

Image Source: Guardian Liberty Voice

Astronauts Return To Earth After 6 Months in Space

By Leave a Comment

A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts landed safely in Kazakhstan on Thursday. They were on a 167-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA station commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Russian flight engineers Elena Serova and Alexander Samokutyaev returned to Earth in a capsule, which landed in a vertical upright position at 0807 (0207 GMT). The drop-off point was 92 miles southeast of the town of Zhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan.

“Expedition 42 is back on Earth”, said a NASA commentator, adding that the landing procedure was done by the book. The capsule was charred on re-entry, but the first medical checks found nothing wrong with the three astronauts. They were imediately covered with blankets, to protect the trio from the steppe cold.

Serova, who was ending her first space mission and became the first Russian woman to serve on the International Space Station, was smiling as a doctor measured her pulse and blood pressure. The other two astronauts, Wilmore and Samokutyaev, were on their second space flight to the ISS, the $100 billion project which flies about 260 miles above Earth.

“Everything is fine. I am drinking real tea with lemon,” Samokutyaev said, while Wilmore added in Russian that he is glad to be back on Earth. The three astronauts were evacuated from the landing area with individual helicopters.

NASA astronaut Terry Virts is in command of the ISS. Along with him in the International Space Station are cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov and Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. They are scheduled to return home in mid-May.

Wilmore and Vrits have done three spacewalks in order to prepare parking spots for two commercial space taxis hired by NASA, which will begin to bring in astronauts to and from the station in 2017. According to NASA, the building operations will require three more spacewalks before the end of the year, in order to install docking ports for the new spaceships.

NASA and Russia will be doubling the mission time, trying to learn more about how the human body reacts to longer stays in space.

NASA astronaut Mark Kelly and Russia’s Mikhail Kornienko are due to spend a year aboard the station. They are scheduled to launch, along with cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, on March 27 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Image Source: NASA

Categories