Stars are closer than we think

There’s a lot of information about the moon. We know that it’s roughly one-sixth the size of the Earth; it is approximately 238,000 miles distant from the Earth; it’s about 4.6 billion years old; it’s covered with an incredibly fine gray powder; it has no atmosphere and no water (except what was recently found to exist as ice in craters near the poles). Astronauts walked on the moon 6 times during the Apollo missions, and we’ve sent many more probes there to map it and study it. But there is much we don’t know about it, too. We don’t know for sure where it came from. Some think it might be a broken-off chunk of our planet. Although there’s evidence that the moon once had active volcanoes, we’re not sure if it is still geologically active (the prevailing theory is that it is not). The moon has its controversial mysteries, too. Some think extraterrestrials have or once had bases there. Some think there’s stuff on the moon — other than the hardware, flags, and debris left there by the Apollo-program astronauts - that the government knows about, but is not telling us. Decades - even centuries - before we sent ships to the moon, observers with telescopes have claimed to see signs of intelligent life or design there. Indeed, there are many enigmatic photos that seem to show shapes and structures on the lunar surface that don’t fit conventional explanations. Perhaps there are reasonable answers for them, but those answers are not easy to find. I will describe some famous lunar anomalies below:

	The Shard.This one, in a photo snapped by the Lunar Orbiter, has been named “the shard” or “the tower,” by Richard C. Hoagland, who comments on this photo at Richard Hoagland’s Lunar Anomalies. Taken from a distance of about 250 miles, the strange structure (if that’s what it is) would be enormous - seven miles high, by Hoagland’s calculations. (The star-like shape above the tower is a camera registration mark.) It’s difficult to believe that such a huge structure actually stands on the moon… so what are we seeing in this photo? Is it a plume of “smoke” from some lunar gaseous emission? Are we seeing the ejecta from a meteorite impact? What is it
	The Castle.This strange object, photographed during an Apollo mission, has been named “the castle” by Hoagland. It seems to have a definite structure, like the remnant wall of some ancient building. The bottom looks as if it has rows of support columns, above which is a high spire. Whatever it is, it’s much brighter than the surrounding landscape. Is it just a trick of light and shadow? A photographic anomaly? Or is it all that remains of some rich Martian’s get-away retreat?
	The Ukert Crater.The Ukert crater, located near the center of the moon as it is viewed from the Earth, contains this amazing equilateral triangle. According to Luna: Arcologies on the Moon, each side of the triangle is 16 miles in length. And note the three bright objects around the perimeter of the crater - if they are joined by straight lines, they too would from an equilateral triangle. Is this evidence of intelligent design, or merely a fantastic coincidence?
	Strange Reflection.This is one of my favorites because it comes directly from a famous photo from the second Apollo mission to land on the moon, Apollo 12. The photo is of astronaut Alan Bean and was taken by Pete Conrad as both stand on the lunar surface. You can see Conrad in the reflection in Bean’s visor. You can also see some instrumentation in the foreground of the reflection. But what the heck is that thing hovering in the sky in the background, pointed out here as “artifact” by Luna: Astronauts Among the Ruins? You can even see the shadow it casts on the ground behind Conrad. It’s been seen as everything from a UFO to a hanging light fixture by those who think the Apollo landings were faked. Yet this photo is really puzzling. We can usually find reasonable, or at least plausible, explanations for the other photos shown here and elsewhere, but this one is truly enigmatic. What about it NASA? What the heck is that thing?

As mentioned above, strange things have been seen on the moon for a long time ago - usually flashes of light or color, or lights that appear to move across the lunar surface. These are known as transient lunar phenomena (TLP), and many of the reports, dating from 1540 to 1969, have been cataloged by NASA. But perhaps the best source for this kind of information is The Lunascan Project, an organized effort by amateur astronomers to record and document TLPs.

Such flashes of light and color could be attributed to meteor impacts or perhaps some kind of gaseous emissions, but harder to explain are the “fastwalkers” that have been videotaped by several amateur observers. This one is a capture from a video taken by an amateur Japanese astronomer several years ago. The dark object (circled in the upper photo and pointed out in the close-up in the lower photo) moved from north to south some unknown distance above the lunar surface. What could account for this anomaly? A satellite orbiting the moon? (It would have to be enormous to show up like this.) A satellite orbiting the Earth that happened to cross the the observer’s field of view as he or she was videotaping the moon? So what could the unexplained object be?

Yes, we’ve been to the moon, we have mapped it extensively, and we have brought back lots of rocks for study. But the moon still remains a great source of mystery and wonder.

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The Japanese space agency JAXA has confirmed that their lunar orbiter Kaguya (aka Selene) is now firmly in orbit around the Moon. That was quick. The agency released this image captured by Kaguya’s high-gain antenna motor camera showing its new home.

The spacecraft isn’t due to take photographs with its full suite of scientific instruments until it reaches its final science orbit later this month. This image was captured by the antenna motor, which just happens to have a view of the Moon in the background. Don’t worry, the images are going to get much, much better.

By the time Kaguya is in its final science orbit, it will be able to capture images of the lunar surface at a resolution of 1-metre. It will also be recording high-definition television images of the surface, which should look just amazing in the eventual documentaries.

Original Source: JAXA News Release

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The newly discovered asteroid 2006 HZ51 has now been removed from NASA-JPL’s list of potentially hazardous objects. The Earth is now safe from that particular threat, which was never anything more than a long-shot with odds of only one in six million. As explained in the original story (below), astronomers assumed that further observations would rule out any danger for the next century at least - and that is indeed what happened.A newly discovered asteroid is now the biggest thing known with a possibility of hitting the Earth in this century – and it is also the one that could hit the soonest.

But the odds of impact currently stand at just one in six million, reducing the fear factor somewhat, and these odds should further diminish with additional observations. This latest addition to NASA-JPL’s list of potentially hazardous asteroids was discovered on 27 April 2006.

The asteroid, called 2006 HZ51, has an estimated diameter of about 800 metres and is the one of the largest objects ever to make the list. An object of that size would cause widespread devastation if it did strike the Earth.

HZ51 also has one of the shortest lead-times to a potential impact of any such object yet found, and the shortest of any potential Earth-impactor currently on the list. The earliest of its 165 possible impact dates is just over two years away, on 21 June 2008.

Hollywood movies

Dan Durda, an asteroid expert and president of the B612 Foundation – which aims to anticipate and prevent such impacts – thinks the discovery of HZ51 highlights that at present there are no good options when faced with so little time to prepare. “There really isn’t a whole lot we could do,” he told New Scientist. “Most of the options that don’t resemble a Hollywood movie involve deflection techniques that require many years or decades.”

Other than stockpiling food and supplies and evacuating the regions most likely to be affected, he said, we would have to “hunker down and take the impact”.

But this is an unusual case, statistically speaking. It is far more likely that Earth’s nations would benefit from a much greater lead time before a potential impact, allowing more time for planning.

For example, the second-most imminent threat now on the list is the asteroid Apophis, which has about a 1-in-6000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036 – plenty of time to prevent it.

Altering orbits

The B612 Foundation has been pushing for a mission to place a tracking device on Apophis sometime in the next decade, so that the possibility of impact can be definitively proved or ruled out. The foundation also wants to send a mission to test ways of altering the orbit of a non-threatening asteroid, to test the viability of such methods.

But the chance of an impact by Apophis might be ruled out as early as this weekend, which will be the last chance until 2013 to observe it by radar, from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

As for the newfound 2006 HZ51, the orbit calculations so far are based on just over 24 hours of observations, and so are likely to change quickly and should not be seen as a serious concern. As Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US, explains: “Almost certainly, observations from one or two more nights will put this to bed as a zero probability.”

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Is the world’s fascination with the possibility of UFOs and more a religion or a natural intuitive sense that life is “out there” based on current scientific research and recent planet-search discoveries?

One of the world’s preeminent astrophysicists, Carl Sagan, believed that “the interest in unidentified flying objects derives, perhaps, not so much from scientific curiosity as from unfulfilled religious needs.”

No one could have foreseen the extent to which the idea of would pervade popular culture prior to the publication in 1897 of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds (see video below) and Kurd Lasswitz’s On Two Planets –both the vanguard of an enormous number of treatments of the alien theme in science fiction.

The modern UFO era and the birth of the extraterrestrial hypothesis began on June 24,1947, when Kenneth Arnold, flying his private plane near Mount Rainier in Washington, reported nine disk-shaped objects flying in formation at speeds he estimated to be over 1,000 miles per hour.

Arnold, a respected businessman and deputy U.S. marshal, was taken seriously and his description of the objects as flying “like a saucer if you skipped it across the water” led to newspapers to coin the term “flying saucer.”

The alien hypothesis first officially emerged in 1948 with the Air Force “Project Sign,” which concluded that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. The report was later declassified and burned by General Hoyt Vandenburg.

If UFOs exist, how do they traverse the universe? According to conventional wisdom, one can only travel through time in a linear fashion at no faster than the speed of light. At that rate, it would take millions of years to traverse the universe, and who has time for that? If there’s a way to manipulate space and time curvatures, then we have all the time we need.

In sync with India’s love-affair with UFO’s, a recent editorial in a popular Indian news site, UFOs, singularity, time folding (and just about every other theory ever proposed) are a complete given. After all, one aspect of quantum physics is that in an alternate universe, anything could happen.

While several advanced theories do have some solid ideas to back them up, others seem a bit far-fetched—even for those willing to accept that there may be upwards of twenty-six dimensions, rather than the standard four. So what current theory is the most likely to someday satisfactorily explain the science of UFO’s?

Though it may seem like pure fiction, it is commonly accepted that wormholes are possible within the framework of general relativity. Although folding space has yet to be documented, there continues to be a healthy debate in the scientific community about their possible existence. If they do exist, it would explain how something or someone could traverse huge distances very quickly. Stephen Hawking gave a lecture, which discussed the possibility of wormholes in folding space. The implications of human travel through these wormholes could result in “short-cutting” through vast distances and even time itself.

According to this idea, one could even move faster than the speed of light. Professor Hawking puts it this way, “If you can travel from one side of the galaxy, to the other, in a week or two, you could go back through another wormhole, and arrive back before you set out.”

While a bit unfathomable, a similar type of “time travel” has already been demonstrated. Scientists who studied passengers on space shuttles have found that, because of the shuttle’s high speed, time moved more slowly for those on board.

So, what is a wormhole? Simply put, “masses that place pressure on different parts of the universe could eventually come together to form a tunnel.” Wormholes are also referred to as “Einstein-Rosen bridges”, and are related to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, and the space-time continuum.

While scientists currently have no realistic method of finding a wormhole (nor proof that they even exist), there is no reason why they couldn’t. In fact, their existence would certainly help make sense of some current paradoxes in the world of physics. While the answers aren’t quite here yet, the questions are being asked. If wormholes are proven to exist, the possibilities will be literally endless.

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NASA

A photo taken on the moon frames Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt as well as the U.S. flag and Earth in 1972, during Apollo’s last lunar mission.

Will the next Space Age simply retrace the steps of the past 50 years with cooler gizmos, or will we find a way to realize the science-fiction dreams that were floating around even before 1957?

Cheap energy from space … tourists circling the moon … industrial resources on other worlds: Those are some of the promises for the next Space Age. But the debate over China’s anti-satellite test demonstrates that the world’s nations also have to keep peace on the space frontier. That may be the biggest reason for pushing onward - just as it was in 1957.

Today’s 50th anniversary of the start of the Space Age provides one of the occasions for looking forward as well as backward.

Another occasion is the successful release of “In the Shadow of the Moon,“ a documentary that retells the story of America’s space effort, using the voices of the astronauts themselves. One of those astronauts is Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt, whose name is the very last on a chronological list of humans who have walked on the moon. After his stint at NASA, Schmitt went on to become a one-term Republican senator representing New Mexico. Today, at the age of 72, he serves as chairman of the NASA Advisory Council.

Schmitt cautions that it’s going to take more than a movie - or a golden anniversary - to push the world into a new Space Age.

“It’s going to come from circumstances, and a more general understanding of just how important space is in the future of humankind,” he told me. “Unfortunately, our educational system is not teaching history, much less providing the kind of information to the general electorate that is necessary to understand why space and other major projects … are important to the future of the country, and the future of humankind.”

OK, so what are the whys and wherefores for the next 50 years? Here are five E’s that come to mind, in roughly chronological order if not in order of importance:

1. Exploration
This is NASA’s oft-stated reason for heading back to the moon and setting its sights on Mars and beyond. Even though the first space race was primarily a clash of empires (see No. 4 below), Schmitt said the space effort’s scientific and technological benefits are still underappreciated, 35 years after the last moon mission.

The trips to the moon marked the first time humans ever explored a “second planet,” and studying the lunar surface shed light on Earth’s hidden origins as well, Schmitt said. “To have that contextual information about what the nature of the environment was here on Earth, during the first almost billion years of Earth history … is extremely important scientifically, and philosophically as well,” he said.

But is exploration alone enough of a reason to spend tens of billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars on spaceflight? To sustain that outward push, and justify the risks to humans, weightier reasons are needed.

2. Entertainment
Entertainment may not sound like a weighty reason for expanding the space age. But it already has a proven economic payoff. And you don’t even have to go into space. Even our “Space Shots” slide show is an example of space-themed entertainment with financial benefits (in the form of ad revenue). Space camps, tourist destinations and zero-gravity airplane flights are other examples of earthbound entertainment with space themes. To celebrate the Sputnik anniversary, nine students from around the world will be taking a zero-gravity flight from Las Vegas on Saturday, thanks to the sponsors of World Space Week.

Even Schmitt has space-based entertainment on his mind. For years, he’s been working with retired professor Ron Wells on the concept for a virtual-reality simulation of lunar landing sites. Players would put on VR headsets and walk around a modeled moonscape, seeing high-resolution lunar vistas in a 3-D setting.

In a series of e-mails, Wells told me that he’s looking into the financial as well as the technical aspects of the project. The plans could heat up after next year’s scheduled launch of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

“A major inroad to really seeing what the moon looks like as the astronauts themselves saw it will occur when the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter starts sending back extremely high resolution images of the lunar surface,” Wells said. “I hope to be in a position by that time to be able to do something more than just talk about it.”

Schmitt said the project could take on a more serious purpose in the years ahead.

“It will provide not only that opportunity for the public to visit at least the last three mission landing sites … but it also is going to be something that will be very useful, I think, in training future explorers of the moon as well as future settlers of the moon.”

Meanwhile, on the high end of the entertainment spectrum, five people have paid up to $25 million each to buy Russian rides to the international space station. A sixth “private space explorer” (also known as space tourist) made himself known just last week. Virginia-based Space Adventures brokered all those trips - and the company’s president and chief executive officer, Eric Anderson, told me that many more such trips could be on the way.

“Within five years’ time we could be signing up 10 people per year on orbital flights,” he said today.

Anderson said his company has proved that private enterprise can make space travel profitable.

“We’ve created a new market,” he said. “People before Dennis Tito’s flight did not believe that someone would pay $20 million, let alone $30 million or $40 million, to go to orbit. … I think that the work that we’ve done here on the eve of the next 50 years in space will certainly be a huge motivator.”

Space Adventures’ next giant leap would be a $100 million-per-seat tour around the moon, which the company is offering in cooperation with the Russian space agency. “I love that mission, but I’m still working on it,” Anderson told me. “We’re just going to have to see.”

Sustaining the private space travel trend will require cheaper flights, for suborbital as well as orbital excursions. Several companies are aiming to fill that need, including SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler, PlanetSpace and t/Space, SpaceDev, Constellation Services International and Spacehab.

It’s worth noting that in addition to the Sputnik anniversary, today marks the third anniversary of SpaceShipOne’s prize-winning launch. But it’s also worth noting that the picture for private-sector spaceflight is still hazy. Rocketplane’s current troubles, most recently documented on NASASpaceFlight.com and Space Fellowship, illustrate how difficult the job can be.

3. Energy
If there’s ever going to be a space gold rush, it will take more than entertainment. After all, Christopher Columbus didn’t sail to America 500 years ago just to take passengers on tours of the ocean blue. He was looking for trade advantages, and riches as well.

Anderson expects that the payoffs from space exploration will become more attractive in the decades ahead. “In 100 years or more, or even sooner, space will be far more critical to our welfare on Earth even than it is now,” he said. “Being able to use the resources in space, and perfect transportation systems that can take us to space, is something we have to do.”

When Anderson talks about resources in space, he’s not necessarily talking about shipping space rocks back to Earth. Sure, some folks may put their faith in asteroid mining, but the bigger prize would be cheaper energy from space.

One oft-mentioned option is electrical power collected by space satellite systems and then beamed down to Earth, perhaps as microwaves. A Pentagon study recently said the idea was interesting enough to pursue further - and next week, space advocates and Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin will be announcing the formation of a new alliance to push for space solar power.

Schmitt has another energy strategy in mind: extracting helium-3 from lunar soil and transporting it to Earth for use in future fusion reactors. Helium-3 is a substance that’s rare on Earth but much more abundant on the moon, and Schmitt argues that it would make an environmentally clean, economically affordable fuel once the fusion process is perfected.

“The economics are competitive with the current price of coal, and as energy prices go up, they just become increasingly competitive with those other energy sources that we use today on Earth,” he said.

Commercial fusion power may sound as much like science fiction as affordable moon travel, but Schmitt insists that researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and elsewhere are making progress toward a workable reactor that would use helium-3.

“It’s not pie in the sky,” Schmitt told me. “These things are happening. Of course, break-even is a long way away, but it still is something that has gone forward with very, very little funding.”

Would it still be worth the risk and expense to ferry helium-3 from the moon to Earth? If the fusion dream really does come to pass, and if the ore extraction and delivery could be done robotically, Schmitt’s calculations could conceivably make sense. For more on the concept, you can delve into his book, “Return to the Moon.”

4. Empire building
When enthusiasts gush about moon tours, space solar power and fusion fuel, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we already have a huge economic stake in keeping the peace on Earth’s satellite frontier. Over the past 50 years, satellites have revolutionized daily life - and if further space exploitation can yield even higher returns, that just raises the stakes for defending against an orbital “Pearl Harbor” attack.

This January, China sparked a mini-Sputnik spat when it fired a rocket to shoot down one of its own satellites. Other countries feared that such test shots could eventually open the way to space warfare - although Chinese officials said that wasn’t their intent. Nevertheless, the old concerns about national competitiveness have been reawakened by recent developments, including NASA Administrator Michael Griffin’s view that Chinese astronauts could well set foot on the moon before American astronauts return there.

“For the United States to sit back and let other nations move forward in this arena would be extraordinarily detrimental to our self-esteem, as well as to our ability to compete in other arenas on this planet,” Schmitt said. “Whether we think we have a choice or not, we do not - particularly with respect to China.”

Of course, the world has changed since Sputnik in 1957 and Apollo in 1969. Washington and Moscow aren’t the only ones with space programs anymore - and NASA can no longer presume to speak “for all mankind.”

To keep the peace, Russia, China, Japan, India, Europe and other space players will have to have a piece of the action. Just this week, the Secure World Foundation issued a call for a global space action plan, complete with an international space traffic management system and cooperative space surveillance system.

Some parts of the plan may sound too utopian, but an international approach to managing satellites, orbital debris and potential threats from near-Earth objects is already taking shape. After all, in the long run, we’re all in this together.

5. Extinction avoidance
In the long run, we’re all dead. But we still hope that civilization will endure even after our own bodies have turned back into stardust. Underlying the next phase of the space age is the idea that the human species will have to extend itself outward to new frontiers, if it is to survive a future cataclysm like the asteroid strike that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Sure, the chances of a civilization-killer - or even a “cosmic Katrina” caused by a smaller space rock - are astronomically low. But now is as good a time as any to start the outward push, Space Adventures’ Anderson said.

“All of this is something that is very long term, but of critical need to humanity,” he told me. “Commercial human spaceflight is a small part. Maybe it’s not such a small part. Maybe it’s a big part.”

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NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer has spotted an amazingly long comet-like tail behind a star streaking through space at supersonic speeds. The star, named Mira after the Latin word for “wonderful,” has been a favorite of astronomers for about 400 years. It is a fast-moving, older star called a red giant that sheds massive amounts of surface material.

The space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer scanned the popular star during its ongoing survey of the entire sky in ultraviolet light. Astronomers then noticed what looked like a comet with a gargantuan tail. In fact, material blowing off Mira is forming a wake 13 light-years long, or about 20,000 times the average distance of Pluto from the sun. Nothing like this has ever been seen before around a star.
“I was shocked when I first saw this completely unexpected, humongous tail trailing behind a well-known star,” said Christopher Martin of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. “It was amazing how Mira’s tail echoed on vast, interstellar scales the familiar phenomena of a jet’s contrail or a speedboat’s turbulent wake.” Martin is the principal investigator for the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, and lead author of a Nature paper appearing today about the discovery. To view the outlandish star, visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/galex/20070815/a.html.

Astronomers say Mira’s tail offers a unique opportunity to study how stars like our sun die and ultimately seed new solar systems. As Mira hurtles along, its tail sheds carbon, oxygen and other important elements needed for new stars, planets and possibly even life to form. This tail material, visible now for the first time, has been released over the past 30,000 years.

“This is an utterly new phenomenon to us, and we are still in the process of understanding the physics involved,” said co-author Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena. “We hope to be able to read Mira’s tail like a ticker tape to learn about the star’s life.”

Billions of years ago, Mira was similar to our sun. Over time, it began to swell into what’s called a variable red giant - a pulsating, puffed-up star that periodically grows bright enough to see with the naked eye. Mira will eventually eject all of its remaining gas into space, forming a colorful shell called a planetary nebula. The nebula will fade with time, leaving only the burnt-out core of the original star, which will then be called a white dwarf.

Compared to other red giants, Mira is traveling unusually fast, possibly due to gravitational boosts from other passing stars over time. It now plows along at 130 kilometers per second, or 291,000 miles per hour. Racing along with Mira is a small, distant companion thought to be a white dwarf. The pair, also known as Mira A (the red giant) and Mira B, orbit slowly around each other as they travel together in the constellation Cetus 350 light-years from Earth.

In addition to Mira’s tail, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer also discovered a bow shock, a type of buildup of hot gas, in front of the star, and two sinuous streams of material coming out of the star’s front and back. Astronomers think hot gas in the bow shock is heating up the gas blowing off the star, causing it to fluoresce with ultraviolet light. This glowing material then swirls around behind the star, creating a turbulent, tail-like wake. The process is similar to a speeding boat leaving a choppy wake, or a steam train producing a trail of smoke.

The fact that Mira’s tail only glows with ultraviolet light might explain why other telescopes have missed it. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is very sensitive to ultraviolet light and also has an extremely wide field of view, allowing it to scan the sky for unusual ultraviolet activity.

“It’s amazing to discover such a startlingly large and important feature of an object that has been known and studied for over 400 years,” said James D. Neill of Caltech. “This is exactly the kind of surprise that comes from a survey mission like the Galaxy Evolution Explorer.”

Caltech leads the Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission and is responsible for science operations and data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, manages the mission and built the science instrument. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The mission was developed under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Researchers sponsored by Yonsei University in South Korea and the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France collaborated on this mission.

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The scientists have found what they create are definitive evidence that the lakes of the liquid methane exist in the surface of the greatest Saturn moon, Titan. In a paper he published in the application the nature of the newspaper, of Thursday the data these scientists of the projection of image of the radar gathered during flyby of the moon by Cassini of the NASA that the spaceship demonstrated in 2006 July that the considered dark characteristics near the North Pole of the moon are explained more more good possible by them than they are lakes. The characteristics considered by constant Cassini with the characteristics that are lakes include their location in topographic depressions and levels that vary of the embankment. The results confirm preliminary burdens of data of flyby that appeared to support the existence of the lakes.

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A new French satellite reached orbit Wednesday to begin a hunting of 30 months stops Earth-like worlds around distant stars. The spaceship, call COROT, assumptions, or exoplanets are first of a series of robotic ends of test hoped to advance the extrasolar planet study perceivably, particularly those that are resembled the Earth. More than 200 exoplanets has been discovered from 1995, although the majority has been giant of the gas greater than Jupiter, that orbit near their stars of the father. “If we found as soon as a planet rocky, later we can be safe that there are many of them,” the scientist this Malcolm Fridlund of the project with the European Space Agency. The name of COROT is abbreviations modified for the planetary rotation of the convection and transits, that are what the spaceship will look for. Fixing their foot-long telescope to a specific area of the sky by 150 days simultaneously, COROT will be able to detect to cushion slighter of the light of a star caused by the passage of a planet through their face. COROT also will look for starquakes and other associated phenomena the internal star operations, measuring the waves of the energy that undulate through the surfaces of stars, a well-known science like asteroseismology. To study the undulation gives to scientists the penetration in the mass of a star, the age and the chemical composition. “The measures required for both (the studies) are essentially equal - the results of the high precision in how the radiation of a star changes in a certain term,” it said to Ian Roxburgh of queen Maria, of the university of London and a collaborator of long term of the COROT science. The European Space Agency has been using a similar technique for the studies of the sun with the solar observatory and of Heliospheric, or SOHO. The scientists glide to at least point 50 stars for the similar studies with COROT. Whereas COROT is the first satellite to take exoplanet-hunts the orbit, it will be far from hard. This NASA of the decade more ahead glides to send an ambitious mission called Kepler to look for Earth-classified planets that they move in orbit around stars in the advisable distances so that the life becomes. Whereas COROT will also look for for rocky worlds, he will need to be near his stars of the father for the detection, a distance that would be probably inhospitable for the life. Europe also has a recordativa letter called Darwin anticipated mission. It would imply a fleet of the spaceship four or five that could take pictures Earth-like from worlds so the scientists can look for samples of the life.

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