Meet Moon 2.0 (now with added water and other useful stuff)
Despite what I was told as a child, we are now pretty sure that the Moon is not made of cheese and, in case there was any doubt, the ‘magnificent desolation’ experienced by the Apollo lunar astronauts – and the chunks of definitely non-cheese derived rock they brought back with them – definitely put those rumours to bed.
The Apollo missions also proved one other thing – the Moon is dry and lifeless. Any hope that the ‘Sea of Tranquility’ hid any of the runny stuff that gave it its name was banished for good and the Moon officially became the driest (and most cheese free) place in the solar system. Then, in 2009, Nasa deliberately crashed one of their space probes (LCROSS) into a lunar crater whose interior had never seen the light of the Sun.
In the resulting plume of dust they detected the unmistakable signature of dihydrogen monoxide – that’s water to you and me. That report, like the first pee during a night of heavy drinking, opened the floodgates and, following the results of an Indian lunar explorer, Chandrayaan-1, those few ‘buckets’ of water became gallons in a single crater and those gallons became some 600million metric tonnes distributed across 40 craters, all in a couple of months.
New results from Nasa's LCROSS impact experiment, published today as a multi-page spectactular in the journal Science, have revealed that, in some areas at least, the Moon's dark craters hide concentrations of water-ice as high as five per cent – that's about 12 gallons for every tonne of lunar soil!
Nasa's Saturn-explorer Cassini, has returned some of the most beatiful images of our solar system and – more often than not – the star of the show is the small Saturnian moon, Enceladus.
Conditions at the edge of our solar system may be much more dynamic than previously thought, new observations suggest. Future exploration missions are expected to benefit in design and mission objectives from a better understanding of the changing conditions in this boundary region.
Few could argue that Hubble is the ‘daddy’ of all space telescopes. In its twenty years of operation, it has pushed back the boundaries of astronomy and physics, sent back images that have captured the imagination of an entire planet and provided PC screen savers to a generation. But all good things come to an end and, although more powerful than ever, Hubble’s days are numbered and its successor is waiting in the wings.
In 1998 astronomers had a bit of a shock when it was revealed that our universe was not behaving as it ought. They had believed that since the Big Bang hurled our universe into existence, its expansion must, inevitably, have been gradually slowing down. It came as no small surprise then when it was revealed that its expansion was actually accelerating and that we seem to be missing some 96 per cent of its matter.